My exact Adword ad shows up in non Adsense Links. I suspect click fraud. I used to include my AdWord Ads in the "content network". I'm still fairly new to Adwords and I just assumed most people do this. I became concerned when I saw my identical AdWord Ad on other people's web sites, but without the usual "ads by Google" statement. I am highly suspicious, why would anyone duplicate my ad? I suspect click fraud. My ad was duplicated 100's of times (cached in Google search). Why would someone go through the trouble of duplicating my ad like that? What would be their motivation if click fraud was not involved? I just had a chat session with a woman from AdWords who confirmed it is not Google's ad. When I reiterated that something is fishy and I suspect Click Fraud and I thought Google would appreciate the 'heads up"; I basically got the impression she didn't care. Anyway, I decided I'm not running the risk of tossing away good money until I figure out what is going on. I continue to use AdWords but for search only. Am I overly suspicious? Also, has anyone else noticed a similar pattern with their ads?
I saw it once, and was particularly annoyed because it had been scraped by a porn site. They'd scraped a whole mix of content from other places, including the ads - which then didn't direct to my site. I don't know why they scraped the ads - to make the site look 'legit' ? I also didn't get much info from google - but they seemed to be telling me that it was nothing to do with them and I wouldn't get charged and it wouldnt effect my account, so I had to leave it like that. (The fact that you saw it cached it a google search makes me thing it was scraped - a 'real' ad doesn't get crawled - and I remember that was how I found about mine too)
Thanks magda; good point about the cache and ads. I can't figure why they scraped the ad either. Maybe it's not click fraud, but it is very strang. If it was done just once I would have let it go, but it was done a hundred + times.