Who has the money to sue Google? Not me. Even if the court says you are right, Google has more money than most people and can simply keep litigating. For a good example of this take a look at a company called Vringo. The court has upheld that Google has willfully infringed upon their patents in their adwords system. Penalties have been set, the patent office has upheld it, etc. but Google continues to use the willfully infringing technology. They even tried a cosmetic fix to keep using it and avoid paying ongoing royalties. The court saw through that and basically said they are still willfully infringing and upped the royalty award. Google is still fighting, probably will for some time, all the while using technology that infringes on anothers patent knowingly. They are above the law. If they are going to act this way towards companies that have the assets to fight them in court, how do you think they are going to act towards the little guys who don't have millions upon millions of dollars to spend on legal teams? This info is my understanding of the case, everyone should look it up and come to their own conculusions in case I've misinterpreted what I've read.
I can tell you that I was caught up in this as well. I started serving ads for Google on my sites way back - near when the program first rolled out I believe. I was suddenly banned not long before my payout was due with no explanation about 2 1/2 years ago after serving ads on my sites for them for years. No appeal, all money earned was kept by Google, I never saw a cent of it. It made up a large portion of my income and not only did it suddenly stop, but the payouts owed to me were negated and my access to the adsense interface was closed so I could not even log in to get information on what was owed, what sites had what clicks, etc.
I 100% believe in what this person is saying as I know all my sites. There were no fraudulent clicks or schemes going on, it was all natural traffic and clicks.
This is yet another reason I stopped using Google and instead use Bing. I think everyone should stop using Google search and switch to a different provider.
Me too. Suspended after years with the same page up. Suddenly the page violated standards and payouts ended with Google holding nearly the $100 minimum.
Google did not say there were "invalid clicks"--only the "risk" of such. Google did not return the money. They are still holding it years later! But they refuse to unsuspend the site.
