Seems like there is a new pirate in town, an AdSense Pirate. A WebmasterWorld thread reports one AdSense publisher being extorted by someone online, making them share half their AdSense income with them or else they would force them to be banned on Google AdSense.

The publisher said:

What is happening is that this ‘pirate’ is sabotaging this publishers AdSense ads, by making it look like click fraud is rampant on his ads. Google may or may not ultimately ban the publisher due to the invalid clicks, which would leave the publisher out of business.

No one is laughing this off, they are all suggesting that this publisher take measures. What measures?

Take down the channel being abusedGather search logs and analyticsEnsure only sites you own can run your adsBlock the IPs that are doing the damageReport the issue to your hostSend all these details in order to Google

I hope this issue doesn’t become wide spread. I have heard of reports of this in the past, but nothing this serious.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.