I made this post because in an effort to contribute to prevention of click fraud and because of hundreds of posts such as this one. People who do this are either careless, stupid or unaware of exactly what they are doing. At the very least, 25% of all clicks are being considered as fraudulent. We're gonna look at how its done so you can better protect yourself. As an adsense publisher and adwords advertiser I know both sides and how each is trying to cheat the system. Adwords advertisers open up false ID accounts and use vouchers to get free advertising points. Minimizing their investment and maximizing their return. So they think, but usually their quality score didn't even have the chance to increase by the time they get a good position at the sponsored link results. And their $50, $100 or $200 accounts have already been exhausted. By doing this however you can increase your click bid to a larger price because your investment will not be the original price, but a lower one due to the free advertising points you have got with your vouchers. Be aware that by doing this you also are falsely inflating the price and depending on the quality score of advertisers, most will pay a larger price for their keywords. You may even drive them out of business. In the long term its better to play fair + you can sleep at night. Now to the next point which is called, Adsense arbitrage and how its done. The ingredients are: a) website with maximized exposure of adsense units and fake, rewritten content b) adsense account c) adwords account d) stupidity What you do now is, in your website you create (stolen) content with high competitive and high paying keywords. In your adwords account you look for low competitive and thus low paying keywords and point them towards your website. You pay $0.05 for your click and visitor, but on your website you get paid $5 for a click. Done, you made a profit of $4.95 through arbitrage. Wrong! First thing you must consider here is that your paid visitor is not necessarily gonna click on your ads. IF you're good you can increase your chances of a click to 20-30% (CTR) and so you still get away with a very large ROI. Still, adsense team knows these tricks and if the majority of your traffic comes from adwords, you're gonna be banned soon. Now to the adsense cheaters, high paying keywords hunters, or low life thiefs as I like to call them. You do realize that the sponsors have to pay out of their pockets for clicks? Sponsors have a lot of competitors and usually pay 0.20$ - 1$ for one click. If all these click don't convert into customers who really are interested in the website, you could eventually drive them out of business, they may lose their houses and don't have the means to bring food for their families. I can't believe how selfish and blind you are not realizing that every click that you get paid for is from someone elses pocket. THAT MONEY IS NOT COMING OUT OF THICK AIR. It IS the same as you were stealing directly from his wallet while he is not watching. Now that you have informed yourself on what things are and how they are done, we come to the part on how to protect yourself against click fraud if you are an advertiser or plan on becoming one in the future. There is a simple feature in adwords that many are not aware of, its called "content bid". What this does is that it separates the prices from content network (websites who use adsense) and search network (google engine's sponsored results when you search for a keywords). Why would you do that? Click fraud occurs almost only on the content network, because of the adsense cheaters. Nobody will be clicking on your ads in the search network, because there is nothing to gain. Except your competitor maybe. What you can do is to disable the content network completely and thus avoid click fraud almost completely, but you may be losing on a lot of traffic because of it. So the best solution is to setup separate prices for content and network. To do this go to your campaign settings and click on the "content bid" tab. You will now be able to set different prices for search network (higher) and content network ($0.01 - $0.10). And this also is the reason for all the low paying clicks publishers (as well as me) are receiving and complaining about. The thanks goes to the adsense cheaters and this is the only reason our click payments are low, but still I rather receive a low paying click than drive a whole company out of business. Now newcomers can educate themselves the real uncensored way.