As if not truthfully clicking on ads were a crime.
We don't owe advertisers anything, least of all the truth.
The term itself is perfectly reasonable. If you're intentionally clicking ads on your own site in order to mislead the advertising provider about your CTR and thus generate more revenue for yourself, that's clearly fraud.
“Ad fraud” is widely accepted when automated clicks are done by or on behalf of someone getting paid for the ads (the site owner selling ad space, usually, as the advertising network, if they were going to defraud the party buying ad placement, would just as easily invent false numbers that employ automated clickers to juice their own stats.)
Other than that, no.
Did we?
Don't we all have a stake in ads? You made me realize this because "cry over this" but I'm not in that industry at all and your sentence seemed to me like just an over-generalization made to justify your point of view.
I then remembered all the time that I couldn't have read/watch/learned something if I didn't have ads in the past, simply because I couldn't convince my parents to use their credit card (for valid reason though).
I remember all the time right I wouldn't have read/watch/learned simply because the risk of it being not worth it was too high even nowadays.
I remember all the time that I currently have to simply trust the comments over an article because it's behind a paywall and I just can't subscribe to every news website.
Actually I have a pretty big stake in this industry. I wouldn't have been the software engineer I am right now if it wasn't from the content that was subsidized by ads. The ones that made that content were also underage and were able to build a pretty big company out of it (Site du Zéro, they are now called OpenClassroom) that now employ an hundred employees (luckily they no longer depends on ads, but still it was what made them being able to breakthrough).
Your parents wouldn't or couldn't pay for things you wanted access to. Do you think they would have been okay with you trading your privacy instead?
There has to be a better way to make sure the internet doesn't starve than ads, and not seeing that way doesn't mean that ads and manipulative marketing are inevitable.