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Comment by Entangled | Hacker News Reader

Around the same time I created a web page just for currency exchange in my country, a kind of fire and forget page that had like a thousand visitors a day, nothing big. I swear to god that I've never ever clicked an ad on that page which I seldom visited, once a month I checked my winnings and they were adding up like $5 a month on average...

Then all of a sudden bam!, unplugged without any reason, they stole my money and never gave any chance to appeal. Sent an email that got an automated response, sent another one got the same automated response, then gave up.

They served all the ads, they got all the money from advertisers, they pocketed it all including my goddamn money.

Plain thievery if you ask me, no matter how you dress it with all the PR in the world.

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I don't think they charged the advertisers for those clicks since they thought them fraudulent.

Yeah right, after five years? Do you think they returned the money? What if most advertisers were one off shots to hit the jackpot on a new startup and failed within six months? Who did they give the money back? Their own pockets?

Come on, PR may say "oh no, we give that money to charity" while texting from a yacht in the middle of the caribbean.

Given Google's continuous refusal to provide an adequate resolution mechanism despite all the negative PR, we can only assume they have a strong financial motivation to not provide it.

Interestingly, AdSense bans are almost always around pay day. We don't know what they do with the funds after an account is banned — we can only go on their word and goodwill, which we know is not to be trusted.

> my winnings and they were adding up like $5 a month on average...

> they pocketed it all including my goddamn money.

It's worth pointing out that it's not your money until it's in your bank account and they can't claw it back. Unless you are really driving serious traffic, it's best not to expect any payout from any of these ad platforms

>It's worth pointing out that it's not your money until it's in your bank account and they can't claw it back. Unless you are really driving serious traffic, it's best not to expect any payout from any of these ad platforms

It's worth pointing out that there's ways to claw it back even after that point: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58268-2005Apr...

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