Fraud responsibility when it comes to Revenue Sharing

[MrBrian]

I would like to bring to attention that, shockingly, my AdSense
account has been disabled as it "posed a significant risk to our
AdWords advertisers." and my website has been unable to display ads
via the API, therefore disrupting the revenue share program with our
publishers. The AdSense check to my company also bounced which I
believe is standard, but very disrupting to a website involved in the
revenue sharing program.
I have already appealed and emailed twice, but it has been almost a
month now with no response at all.
I tried resolving the issue over the phone to no avail - account
appeals are by email only I was told repeatedly.

I know that this isn't the place for account issues, but it revolves
around the question of who exactly is responsible for invalid clicks
(or other types of fraud) when the API is used to display ads, and
what exactly is our role in prevention. During my review process I
placed many warnings on my site for users not to click their own ads,
and also coded the site to not display any ads for logged in users to
prevent accidental/intentional clicks even further. Besides being a
complete and utter mistake, there are only 2 explanations I can think
of for this happening.
1. If publishers we share revenue with commit fraud, we as the content
host are also responsible.
2. In some cases ads are displayed with only the developer AdSense ID
either because the content page does not belong to a publisher, or
because there was an error with generating the code using the API, so
it is possible that invalid clicks on those ads would be been as our
responsibility?

I really think every AdSense API member should be aware of whats
happened here and ask for some clarification about the policies
related to publisher fraud and revenue sharing. I have been an
approved Adsense API developer for just about 2 years now and while I
have seen many of my publishsers have their accounts disabled, I have
not had any account problems of my own until now.

Regards,
Brian Freeman

[Google AdSense API Support Team]

Hi API developers,

As a reminder, all Google AdSense publishers are responsible for the
ad traffic affecting their publisher IDs. For example, AdSense API
developers who use their non-host publisher ID on their publishers'
pages are still responsible for the resulting traffic and activity.

If you are a live API partner and have any specific questions or
concerns about your account please don't hesitate to contact us at
adsenseap...@google.com .

Regards,

Ryan
Google AdSense API