Yeah, that happened to me 15 years ago. Just crossed the $100 payout limit and suddenly, FRAUD! What ticks me off the most is if they have the ability to detect and block fraud, then why block accounts? Why the death penalty? Just don't pay out fraudulent clicks and terminate repeat offenders, rather kill the account on the first blush with no appeal.

I wonder if there's a simple explanation for this pattern.

Fraud detection costs money. If there is no money changing hands, why spend the money on detection?

Terminating after 1 offence, 2 offences, or n offences only changes how long a competitor / blackmailer / disgruntled former employee or ex-spouse / random bored idiot with a stolen credit card needs to continue paying for clicks.

They don't charge the ad buyer. My account was terminated 15+ years ago, still can't run ads under that account for some reason I do not know, but they were able to detect it and block it, whatever "it" was. So I'm punished forever for something forever unknown to me, despite not doing anything. I think the rule is unfair.

It seems unfair to the point that the entire model is unworkable. Well, perhaps they could ignore the "fraudulent" clicks when billing and never terminate anybody.

By "paying for clicks", I was thinking that they'd be paying some service to click on the ads, rather than writing their own scripts or doing it manually.

> if they have the ability to detect and block fraud, then why block accounts?

To protect their business by protecting their reputation.

The scale of Google's advertising business(es) means that a loss in revenue from poor public perception of their ads is likely to be far more than a few thousand small ad buyers (those spending <US$5000/mo) getting cut off, which would barely register as a rounding error (<0.1% of just AdWords revenue alone.)

How is perception affected by not-paying suspect accounts but not banning them either? The public doesn't see the clickfraud

They could be shadow banning them or they could be continuing to allow them to operate in service of their algorithms. The public doesn’t see clickfraud but they also don’t see headlines about Google ads having a fraud problem.

A rare anecdote of Joe Schmo not getting his 97.54 payout is effectively meaningless.

I understand this, but it's suspicious when they manage to detect the fraud only when it's time to pay out the revenue to the site owner. It's also a little unfair to assume every detection of fraud is 100% purposeful action by the site owner and permanently terminating their account without even so much as a warning. In my case, I had ads running on my blog. It took 4 months to rack up $100. I think the chances I was purposefully defrauding them was low, given how long it took to get to the payout point.

> Google either doesn't care about intent, or their systems have consistently bad judgment.

Not to defend Google here but... how did you determine this? By seeing those < 0.01% of issues where it goes wrong? How did you determine the magnitude here and how do you know the systems aren't right in > 99.999999% cases?