My adwords account was hacked and incurred a cost of $5938.04 in one day

Yea, I was thinking the same thing about it only being 173 keywords, I do find that strange, but who knows why they only used that many.

In Fact, if they were sending traffic to a website that they were profiting from, that would be an even better reason to use thousands of key words

The thing is, that they were NOT sending the traffic to any website that they could profit from

They were sending the traffic to www.s.com (which does not exist)

 

Vstar,
I'm sorry I wasn't more clear. You didn't understand my post. What I'm saying is that you have provided the answer. Because they were not profiting from the website where the traffic was sent via your ads, they may have been profiting from the website or websites where the traffic came from in the content network.

Your adwords ads in the content network are someone else's adsense ads on their webpage. By using exact match on obscure keywords they can target specific pages keyword optimized for adsense. Then by compromising at least 5+ accounts, they can drive the price up for the top 4+ positions on the content network for their specific keywords. I don't think they would have used placement targeting, as that would be too obvious. If they chose a very real, but very small niche where others would also profit, it would help to mask their true identity.

If it is certain that the traffic went to www.s.com, and that they couldn't have made money on it, then I think this is a profitable and likely scenario. Unless you think that Google folks changed their stuff to say s, s, s, www.s.com simply as a way to hide the truth from you without deleting the info. Adwords accounts don't really ever delete anything, so maybe they just changed it?

I think they would more likely have sent traffic to an overseas website with a non-google method of monetizing the traffic. This adsense/content network thing I suggested is flawed in that google retains control over them getting paid.

 

Sorry to hear about that. The same thing happened to me about 6 months ago.

They spent $3K, spending something like $16 on some keywords. Google closed my hacked account and made me open a new one.

I now check my account every day, even if I don't have campaigns running just to make sure everything is ok.

You would think Google could identify campaigns that suddenly increase drastically and contact the owner. I was probably spending no more than $20 per day and it jumped to $3K overnight.

Well, at least Google is good about not charging you. I do wonder how hard they go after these thieves though.

Mike

 

My theory is that people in the Adword's team are doing this themselves. There may be a couple corrupt Adword employees who are looking to make quick dollars. There is no other explanation for this. People's accounts are getting hacked out of nowhere. People who haven't fallen for any phishing pages, or created easy passwords are getting hit. Not to mention that lots of the accounts being taken over have been inactive for months. I am 95% sure that it's people inside the Adword team pulling the strings.

 

Ok, now I understand what you meant... You've got a great point!