Ad Code Taken and used - Pasted my code on their page

[Roadkill]

Some dimwhit has not only copied my content and is hot linking my bandwidth. But...... he pasted my ad code onto his page along with one of his own ad blocks.

My greatest fear is that this person is stupid enough to probably click their own ads and crap like that.

I have already contacted his free web host (fugures) about the abuse and reported it to adsense abuse. Any other suggestions to help protect my good standing account with google?

This is very irritating

[mack]

I think you have already made the samart move by contacting Adsense support. That is the single most importaint thing you can do to protect your account.

Mack.

[RobinK]

Take a look at the site and see if they are copying the content of other sites as well and start letting those sites know about it. If enough people complain things tend to get "fixed" quicker.

[humblebeginnings]

The ultimate nightmare; a complete m*ron on the loose with your AS-code. Best of luck Roadkill!
Adsense Adsvisor, could you perhaps comment on this?
How to deal with that kind of stuff?
Will G believe that a website with your AS-code is actually not your website?

[Tropical Island]

Just goes to show how important it is to check your logs even if it's just a quick glance. I always check out "hot linkers".

[Roadkill]

Yes there is a lesson here.....

Check your logs... If I hadn't checked where traffic is coming from, I might have never known untill I got the dreaded suspended letter.

[Jean]

So if this idiot hadn't hot linked some of the content you could have had him running loose with your AdSense code. A nightmare scenario!
It would be good to have ASA's comment on this one.

[Roadkill]

It is a nightmare and it has me very concerned at the moment. Mainly since he appears to be clueless as to what he is doing, (pasting someone elses code for which get gets nothing from) and being clueless leaves alot of room to screw things up even further. Like my account...... EEEEEEEEEE..K!

[incrediBILL]

If their web host is in the US send a DMCA complaint for the stolen material which will get the account disable ASAP and then you're a little safer while AdSense deals with the rest of the problems.

[Curiosity]

Also, if he's hotlinked to your images, you might want to reconfigure your .htaccess file so that all that shows up on his page is a notice that he's a bandwidth thief. Looks bad for him, strengthens your own case.

[wizarddave]

Here's a cool thing about preventing hotlinking by using your .htaccess file:

In my experience, webmasters who hotlink to your images will already have looked at the image once themselves. When they hotlink to it, they will continue to see their hotlinked image because they are seeing it from their browser cache. However, all visitors to their site will see the broken image (or the replacement image notifying viewers of the bandwidth theft) and this moron's website looks stupid pretty-much in perpetuity, and serves him right, because the images always look like they're working OK to him, as long as the image remains in his browser cache.

I have some sites that continue to hotlink the same images on my site, some now for more than a year. They still don't recognize their visitors aren't seeing the images! :-)

[larryhatch]

Hi Wizard: I noticed much the same thing.

Some Korean blog hotlinked 2 or 3 images over a year ago.
Rather than .htaccess redirects, I played musical filenames for certain .gif images.
I rename the real image, and point my pages to it.
Then I substitute something fun under the original hotlinked .gif filename.

Like I say, its been over a year and they never noticed apparently.
If they would just clean their cache it should be obvious. -Larry

[Roadkill]

Larryhatch: I did that to some of the video files that someone else was hotlinking to. Its just a pain because I have to rename the file and assc. image and substitute dummy file. What a pain.

wizarddave: What and basically how would I modify the htaccess file: This sounds like it may be a more viable fix for the problem.

Now I'm just waiting for a Google response. Maybe early this week. I hope.

[wizarddave]

Here is the .htaccess I use. You put this in each subdirectory you want the files protected from hotlinking:

------------------------

RewriteEngine On
Options +FollowSymlinks

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER}!^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER}!^http://([a-z0-9-]+\.)*mydomain.com/? [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER}!^http://([a-z0-9-]+\.)*another-domain-you-want-to-allow.com/? [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER}!^http://([a-z0-9-]+\.)*babelfish.altavista.com/? [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER}!toolbar.googl [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER}!/search\?q=cache: [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER}!/search\?sourceid=navclient [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER}!/translate_c\?hl= [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(gif¦GIF¦jpg¦JPG)$ - [F]

ErrorDocument 403 /blank.html
Options -Indexes

---------------------------------------

The lines under the lines with your domain(s) allow your images to work in google image search and other services that scrape your page in an allowable way.

blank.html is a zero-byte file.

[dvd1000]

If there is 'Ad theft' and if the thief is doing it to make a quick buck from adsense, I report them to adsense team.
Anyone stealing content is risking his good standing with adsense & can be removed.

[morpheus83]

Keep us posted on what Adsense says. This is a real serious issue. Adsense code should be like traditional banner networks it should only display ads on sites under which the user has signed up and PSA's on other sites. Adsense should seriously think about it.

[isuccess]

Somethings seems to be flawed if you have to "police" this kind of stuff. I think pub-x should be connect to authorized IPs for use and "open" for clicks to get credit. An engineering job to be done, I guess.

[AdSenseAdvisor]

Roadkill -

Can you sticky mail me with your account information? I'll make sure to follow up with the appropriate teams.

-ASA

[StupidScript]

While agreeing with isuccess, isn't the real result of this that you get paid for any clicks on the bogus adblock? It's not like (a) the rogue has access to your account or (b) they are making any money off of it. The clicks get credited to your account.

The only downside would be if they engaged in abuse and got your account suspended for it. If that were to happen, it would seem to be fairly simple to present your evidence, including your earlier notification to the AdSense team, and get the matter resolved.

You walk away with the earnings generated by the rogue, and, in the end, they get banned or whatever.

[Tropical Island]

The only downside would be if they engaged in abuse

It has been suggested before and needs to be repeated.

AS should have each account register the sites that are using their AdSense code. It just seems logical. They ask us to do this when we sign up.

From some posts lately in this forum it's obvious that a new group of scam artists are getting involved. These people who have been involved in Ponzi schemes and other Internet scams are becoming more active. I have personally followed the trails of some of the posters and found them involved in things that don't bode well for AdSense.

If ASA is monitoring this thread then maybe you could pass on the word that now is the time to become more proactive with both this type of thing and the regular abuse.

If this is not in your job description maybe you could drop a note to GoogleGuy or some other person who may have more clout to set a fire under someone.

[Roadkill]

Here is a update for you all. At this point I have not heard from Google. But I dont find that to be unusual. When I reported it to G, I also reported them for hotlinking to their free hosting company. Today that host has shut them down. Which is good but.....

This person will simply get another host and I will have to find him and potentialy deal with this issue again in the future, so it really needs to be addressed. I do find it hard to believe that I am the first one that this has happened to. So I am hopefull that it can be resolved (without any AS downtime)

Tropical Island is right, there are some new approaches being taken to scam people and companies. CHECK YOUR LOGS.........

[leveldisc]

It seems odd to me, that you only need to have your first site that uses adsense checked by google. After that, they don't care.

I would have thought, that they would want to check every site that carried adsense. At least they could cross reference a site to an adsense account and avoid this problem.

It would surely improve the quality of the sites carrying adsense as well.

[mzanzig]

Roadkill -

At this point I have not heard from Google. But I dont find that to be unusual.

Have you seen the friendly offer to stickymail the details by AdSenseAdvisor earlier in this thread?

I think that having ASA around is one of the best way to get support for such serious cases.

-- M.

[dzcap]

Imagine if you didn't know of this and got the suspended email. Then when you ask adsense for more info, they give the canned "cannot reveal" response. And let's not forget the suspended notice is a canned email as well.

Quite scary.

[Clark]

This is so obvious and ridiculous and preventable. If google reports on the urls or at least domains that display the code, we can find out about this so much easier, quicker and tell Google not to pay us for ads we didn't place...and keep us from getting kicked out.