[avita1]

It's impossible for Joe ads buyer to price in fraud, because he doesn't actually know how much fraud is happening. Only Google/the other big exchanges have information to get even close to knowing how much fraud is happening and they have a vested interest in letting fraud slip through and not detecting.

And yes, Google cooperated in this specific case, but only after the problem got really bad. It's really hard to take a charitable view when Google, a large player in the ads space, and a company known for technical excellence, allows stuff like this to happen:

> An agency or advertiser looking to place an ad would only see the name of TBS.com in the ad exchange and not know they were buying ad space on a counterfeit site. Then the bots would visit the fake site and view the ad to generate revenue. (This technique of masquerading as a legitimate publisher is called domain spoofing. It’s a long-running issue, though a new standard called ads.txt [1] is helping curb it.)

This article (https://digiday.com/media/ft-warns-advertisers-discovering-h...) is a year and a half old. Google obviously had the resources to discover this years ago and failed to do so.

[1] https://digiday.com/marketing/wtf-ads-txt/