income without ads?! Now banned

[vampke]

Hello,
I have been using adsense on a few hobby sites for the last 15 years. Recently I have received my first ban for extremely high RPM, of which I informed Google.
Since no one at google seems to follow up on issues they banned me for this.
After weeks my account got reinstated. I took off the ads on the site that was causing the issue. Even though no ads appear on it at all, since a few days there is again very high RPM and income, causing a new ban. Even though I am now apparently banned, the site keeps generating the same income with RPM nearing 2000.
Google is completely unresponsive, the help forum is not helpful and the information on the support pages is completely outdated.
Can someone advice what to do? Is there a way to completely deactivate the ad (there should be according to the support page, but the option is nowhere to be found)?

[engine]

Sorry to hear that.

Can you check that somone hasn't cloned your site?

[JorgeV]

Hello,

Be sure to configure your adsense account to allow ads only on YOUR site(s).

[vampke]

how do you do that? The option to do so does not appear in my account where it should be.

[edited by: not2easy at 11:59 am (utc) on Feb 8, 2021]
[edit reason] Please see Charter [/edit]

[NickMNS]

There should be a tab in the left sidebar called "sites" click there. It is a bit difficult to say for those that have already done it, as once the option is selected you cannot un-do it, so the option is no longer in the account. But I believe that it is in the sites tab.

[vampke]

I must have done ikt already then, can't find it anywhere...
In the meantime my income keeps skyrocketing, even though my account has been suspended and there are no ads on the problematic site....

[not2easy]

This is not an answer for how to deal with the situation, but for over a month now there has been an increase in this kind of activity where even with ads removed the "invalid click" activity continues. In this thread they were able to resolve the problem: [webmasterworld.com...]

To see what helped for others, there are more cases you might want to read:
[webmasterworld.com...]
[webmasterworld.com...]

[NickMNS]

In the meantime my income keeps skyrocketing ... and there are no ads

It sounds like it might be related to this issue:
[webmasterworld.com...]

You would not be the first here, but it seems that blocking bots with Cloudflare seems to solve the problem.

[levo]

First, go to your adsense account and check 'sites' report. If the earnings are from your domain, it's not cloning.

Second, if you have analytics, check Audience > Technology > Browser report, and select Adsense tab. That should give you an idea if it's a single attacker/browser. Keep checking other reports Adsense tabs to find a pattern that you can hopefully ban/prevent.

Good luck.

[vampke]

Thanks everyone for your help, I have done the cloudflare thing and will check how it goes.
It baffles me that a monopolist company with supposedly the best It'ers in the world can't / won't protect it's customers against this, but rather choses to block them.
I remember a time when I could just contact a guy at support when there were issues....

[JorgeV]

It baffles me that a monopolist company with supposedly the best It'ers in the world can't / won't protect it's customers against this, but rather choses to block them

Adsense, does protect its customers this is why they are blocking "your" account. You (us) are NOT a customer of Adsense, the customers are the advertisers, just saying.

And it's up to the publishers to ensure the quality of traffic sent to these advertisers, and when publishers are not succeeding to achieve so, then it's Adsense making choices to block, or limit ad serving, to protect its customers (the advertisers).