I think I've been scammed - is my adsense account at risk?

[asd90]

Forgive me if this is the wrong section or if this is just a stupid post. I'm new, a web developer trying to get his feet wet in the IM world.

I recently purchased a couple of autoblogs that were advertised as making $500/month each through adsense. They are. More in fact. I'm writing original content for them now, trying to make them legit.

CTR is normal. Looking at the traffic, though there are a couple dozen countries, China makes up about 65% of the traffic. The niches WOULD appeal to asian countries, but it still seems odd. What's most worrying is that the traffic is almost exclusively direct. I don't know if its possible that I installed the GA code incorrectly and that would cause it, or if there's some other potential cause for this, but clearly it's not normal.

My guess at this point is that the traffic is bought and, obviously, advertisers wouldn't be getting their moneys worth. I don't know why it would still be coming weeks after, but whatever. Given the price I bought these at, it definitely seems too good to be true.

My primary question is, if this traffic is fake and there's something evil afoot, would I get a warning and the funds removed from the account or would it just be banned? I do have plans to build my own sites later and utilize adsense, so a lifetime ban would be pretty bad for me.

Thank you.

[ichl13]

How much did you pay for it?
Normally something that seems too good to be true is too good to be true. If they can flip these sites quick enough to give you a low price and make enough money, they're probably using black hat methods.

What general niche is it?
There is a possibility that your particular niche or keyword actually promotes returning visitors, so someone could have bookmarked your website and refer to it regularly. For example a news site. Can you check if the majority of visitors are unique ones?

A lot of the time, adsense would just ban you because they can't risk tarnishing their image of being fair to advertisers. I would definitely suggest investigating deeper to see where the traffics coming from

if you're going to be relying on adsense as your primary form of income, don't risk it! I definitely suggest you take off your adsense code for the minute until you've got EVERYTHING figured out

[36burrows]

I'm not 100% sure but I wouldn't wait around to find out.

If you even have the slightest doubt then I wouldn't risk your adsense account.

Buying auto-blogs just isn't a long-term business strategy anyway.

[asd90]

Thanks for your responses.

I paid about $2k for them. I guess it was reckless, but I was okay with risking the money. The reason I bought them was because he had payments from google to show from the last year. He has dozens of other sites and was selling these due to "personal financial problems" -- obviously, anyone trying to sell something illegitimate would use that line.

Yes, the visitors have been mostly unique. I guess the only thing that's keeping me believing it might be legit is hearing about other people having issues with traffic showing up as "direct" when it isn't.

I understand it isn't a long term business. I was trying to dive in and see how this all works.

Is there a way to request a review from adsense? I'd remove the adsense code and ask for one, if it's possible.