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Comment by blakesterz | Hacker News Reader

For some reason I read the comments...

"Someone who hates you is doing this on purpose" reads one.

While I have NO IDEA what that's about, it does make me wonder, can people cause trouble for their competition through ad sense by doing things to cause the site to be dropped like this? That comment says it's because someone is leaving bad comments on the site, which seems unlikely, but I've read other stories about DMCA abuse or something like that to bring down competing sites or videos or whatever.

Can someone abuse some kind of adsense reporting system and cause this to happen?

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Yes, I can use a programmatic ad exchange such a Google’s to push ads on a site that would result in a negative experience for visitors. The creative review process is pretty lax. I haven’t heard of a documented attack, but it would be easy to grief a small site in such a way.

I remember an old blog that was trolled by having homoerotic ads plastered all over it, but looking into the details now they just bribed the server master.

There have been several waves of attacks where somebody posted malicious ads via Adsense that would use JS to redirect visitors to a different page. In the cases I was involved with, they were only targeting mobile traffic and redirected to a scam-site that asked users to download an app to fix a virus etc.

We've reported it, never heard back from Google. It went away after a few days each time, and hasn't happened in two or three years, at least not to any site I'm involved with.

Crazy something like that was even allowed to continue for a few days

My guess is that they ran it on smaller sites only and targeted those. In my case, it was a "entertainment news"-site that pulled in about 3-5k visitors/day back then - enough to get a lot of victims seeing your ad but not enough that they'd have a direct line to Google or have their own IT people.

I'm not sure about the adsense part, but they definitely can for the part where gmail is flagging their newsletter as phishing. Gmail has an option where any user can report a received email as phishing.

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