I've been a google premium publisher for over a year now, and have had an income ranging from between $50k to $100k per month.
Last week I logged into my account to see the 'Your payments are currently on hold' message, and the required action was to e-mail google, which I did.
Just received my e-mail back saying that after an investigation, it was found that there has been over $200k worth of invalid click activity on my account, and it will be deducted from my next payment (Which will be nowhere near that amount, one is to assume it'll be taken over the next few months, leaving me with nothing?) However, they then go on to tell me that my account is in good standing and they look forward to my continued participation in the program.
Surely if your company had been defrauded the sum of $200k, you wouldn't want to co-operate with them anymore? What makes matter more interesting is, over the last 5 months Google have paid out $386k to me, which means over 50% of all my clicks have been invalid. Assuming this has been going on for months and months, why was I never told this during any of the recent and frequent conversations I have with my member of the google optimization staff, especially when the converstaions were about increasing my revenue and optimizing my site?
I hope for certain that this is a decimal point error, but if they intend to deduct over $200,000 from my account over the next few months, I'll be left with little choice but to pull the google ads and replace them with adverts that will actually generate me some income.
So basically google has decided to do a $200,000 chargeback to this poor guy's account, deducting all of his new income from the total owed. Apparently he wasn't even trying to generate false clicks or anything, he just runs an insanely popular myspace generator site. (By the way, it'll take him 5 months to pay back google if they take all of his income).
There are a lot more of these stories cropping up, and dealing with greater and greater amounts of money. It's pretty implausible that they'd ALL be fake, especially because of the ever-increasing status of the sites and because some of these people have been posting on various forums about their adsense income for months or Years before this stuff happens.