Publishers who earn from Adsense, beware of this new extortion racket

Do you monetize your blog or website and earn income through Adsense? Then there is reason to be cautious because according to a recent report from KrebsOnSecurity, some extortionists are targeting Adsense site owners and hitting them with a very peculiar demand.

KrebsOnSecurity came across this blogger who was essentially asked by some extortionists through email to pay them $5,000 worth of bitcoins or else they'll "flood" his site with fake spam bots which will keep "clicking" his site's ads so that Google Adsense will ultimately suspend his account. This is the exact message he received:

“Very soon the warning notice from above will appear at the dashboard of your AdSense account undoubtedly! This will happen due to the fact that we’re about to flood your site with huge amount of direct bot generated web traffic with 100% bounce ratio and thousands of IP’s in rotation — a nightmare for every AdSense publisher. More also we’ll adjust our sophisticated bots to open, in endless cycle with different time duration, every AdSense banner which runs on your site.”

The email further talked about how his Adsense income will see a temporary rise but eventually Google will wise up to the fact that the newly acquired traffic is all fraudulent and thus suspend his account, at least temporarily.

The blogger initially thought this was an empty threat and ignored it but as he watched his blog's traffic and activity, it soon became clear that those on the other side were starting to actually carry out this threat.

KrebsOnSecurity also contacted Google regarding this issue who refused to discuss it citing partner contract agreements. However, Google said that it has "extensive tools and processes to protect against invalid traffic across its products, and that most invalid traffic is filtered from its systems before advertisers and publishers are ever impacted".