A friend told me her credit card bill had more than $10,000 in charges from Google AdWords.
What I'm guessing happened is:
- Someone got her credit card number somehow.
- Set up an AdWords account using her number and name.
- Created ad campaigns and offered to pay extremely high amounts of money for click throughs.
- Set up "dummy" pages with Google AdSense and content that would display their ads.
- Got to work getting those ads clicked numerous times.
It's all theorizing but it seems like the only explanation why credit card thieves would do this - to reliably be able to profit from ads without a third-party advertiser crying click fraud.
Now, how do they expect to collect that money without Google busting them?
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