Click bombing

Sabotage rather than fraud for profit. An attacker clicks a target's ads over and over, by hand, through a click farm or with bots, hoping Google reads the pattern as a publisher clicking their own ads. It comes from the AdSense world, where a website's ads are directly clickable, and creators encounter it through the same AdSense account their YouTube earnings run through.

Google filters most of it. Real-time and delayed systems strip suspicious clicks out before or shortly after they reach reports, so the visible effect is usually earnings vanishing rather than an account closing. Sustained invalid activity still puts an account at risk, so gather the evidence and report it through the invalid traffic form rather than sitting on it.