I think you are walking a slippery slope.

I would start wondering about something else.

I think this is a serious issue, because I'm always paranoid that someone can get my adsense account banned just by clicking on my ads repeatedly.

This question comes up all the time, because the very nature of the Internet makes it possible for these things to happen. The reasons I sleep well at night are:

1. There's no particular motivation for getting anyone banned. The one exception might be cases where the person is doing AdWords arbitrage and theoretically driving up keyword costs (advertisers have been known to click on their competitors' AdWords ads as well). But other than that, site A being banned is unlikely to help site B in any way.

2. There's a significant chance that a malicious person's actions could be tied back to them by Google, and they'd find their own account banned instead.

3. The malicious party would also have considerable civil and/or criminal liability if they could be traced. There have already been a number of legal cases involving competitors using denial-of-service attacks, fake spam, malicious forum posts, etc.; I'm not aware of any that specifically involved AdSense.

4. Google are insanely smart and have been doing this for years. They're probably two or three steps ahead of the bad guys. Even if they can't necessarily determine the source of an attack, there's a good chance they could tell the difference between a real fraud attempt and someone who's deliberately trying to get caught.

Google are insanely smart and have been doing this for years. They're probably two or three steps ahead of the bad guys. Even if they can't necessarily determine the source of an attack, there's a good chance they could tell the difference between a real fraud attempt and someone who's deliberately trying to get caught.

Plus, when Google does identify the source of the attack, the perpetrator will almost certainly get a "Your account has been disabled because of invalid clicks" notice.

I wonder how many of the "I was banned for invalid clicks but I didn't click on my own ads" threads were started by people who were bounced for invalid clicks after stupidly mounting click attacks on other publishers' ads?

Would it be possible for someone, say a competitor, be able to get your adsense account banned

Absolutely.

by repeatedly clicking on your ads?

We don't know precisely what technique would do the trick. But since we do know that a large and "growing" number of publishers are banned via a 100% automated process, it is a sure thing that it is possible to game the system to get someone else banned.

There's no particular motivation for getting anyone banned.

Insufficient ad inventory is a reasonable motivation. And the fact that an estimated 4% of the population is sociopathic supplies motivation for many Bad Things. If you've never run into a competitor who would cut off their own nose to spite your face, you are fortunate. The whole "rankings fever" aspect of AdSense also supplies motivation. People obsessed with being unable to get on page #1 for keyword X might be motivated to take away the earnings of someone else who can. I would amend your statement to: There's usually no good rationale for getting anyone banned.

But that's very different than saying there's "no particular motivation".

they'd find their own account banned instead.

Only if they're dumb. It's not at all easy to trace a botnet back to the person who rented it for a few days. You would pretty much have to have a "mole" who was able to monitor the conversation between the attacker and the person renting out the zombies. Unlikely. If you have the money and lack of morals, renting a botnet to get someone banned should be nearly a sure thing, IMHO.

The malicious party would also have considerable civil and/or criminal liability if they could be traced.

Agreed. That's part of what keeps the system from falling apart immediately. If anyone could just reach up and push a button to get someone else banned with no fear of consequences, AdSense would be in shambles within 72 hours. Just human nature.

To assume that criminal penalties are a deterrent to 100% of the population, however, is to ignore human nature.

Google are insanely smart and have been doing this for years.

When I read the court-mandated audit of their click fraud, it pretty much says to me "Google isn't insanely smart". It also says they are unconcerned about bad guys trying to get anyone banned. It's a small enough problem that they can ignore it as "shrinkage". That's consolation to the masses of AdSense publishers, but no consolation to the hopefully small number of publishers who get maliciously banned by someone else.

Again, there's virtually no way, barring them having spies working for the bad guys (in which case Google is liable for all the bad things they are doing) for Google to distinguish who is doing the fraud when a botnet starts attack-clicking a site. That's why they explicitly reserve (and exercise!) the right to terminate your account for clicks they deem "invalid", whether you had anything to do with those clicks or not.

Bot-nets work. They're inexpensive. They can cover a vast expanse of IP address space (the spam explosion of the past couple of weeks can be fairly reliably shown to involve multiple hundreds of thousands of zombie PCs). When a botnet supplies the click fraud, Google has little choice but to ban the publisher, since there's no way to find out who payed for that slice of the botnet's time. They have their hands full trying to detect the publishers who really are engaged in click fraud via botnets that just very slowly increment their profits over time. Botnets supply fraudulent clicks via the very same PCs that real, unsuspecting human beings use. They are Google's real focus of attention.

Can somebody get you banned? Absolutely. Just like somebody can walk into your physical store and drop 5 hand grenades and put you out of business. All business has risk. The question is, what will you do to manage that risk?

And will you decide not to open a store because someone could walk in with a hand grenade?

Even though it's possible, as ronburk explains, for someone to get you banned, that shouldn't stop you from working with AdSense. But have a backup plan.

Only if they're dumb.

A lot of people, and especially a lot of crooks, aren't very smart. Somebody mentioned that the average prisoner's IQ in Great Britain was in the 80s, and several U.S. studies have shown similar IQ averages. (IMHO, the great criminal minds--as opposed to the dummies--have more productive things to do than get competitors banned from AdSense.)

I really don't think that a James Bond-like scenario such as renting a botnet is that easily accomplished. Plus that approach would likely be too heavy-handed to appear to be a real attempt at fraud, especially if the target had a legitimate website with organic traffic and any history with AdSense.

Again, I'm not saying it's impossible. There's speculation in Wired this month that an organized botnet attack could take out Google itself. But the thing is more easily imagined than done.

"And would I be able to get someone else's adsense account banned by clicking on their ads repeatedly"

And therafter log into your adsense account with the same computer, same ip-address ...? I wouldn't try it if I were you.

The question was: "Could a competitor get you banned from AdSense?"

The answer is yes. If they were committed they could get you banned. Google might ban you simply because you know people who want to get you banned. Bad neighborhood. Bad friends... You're known by who you associate with. If somebody launches a click attack against you you may weather it out but google will ask themselves if maybe this might happen again. You can get your account terminated on this basis alone. Not EFV of course but us other mortal website owners.....

Again, I'm not saying it's impossible. There's speculation in Wired this month that an organized botnet attack could take out Google itself. But the thing is more easily imagined than done.

An organized botnet attack could disrupt certain parts of Google's infrastructure, such as DNS, which would make its servers unreachable from multiple critical Internet points, at least for a while.