[oal]

I was first banned back in 2010 a few days before the payout date. After that I made numerous attempts at getting the account reopened, via their support forms. Then in the fall of 2013, it was reopened, after yet another support "ticket". I didn't start using it again immediately as I had to prepare my sites to at least partially go back to Adsense, after years of using other services. Guess what? A month after I was back on Adsense, the account was shut down again, without warning, and my money was gone.

I would not be surprised if yesterday's "leak" is indeed true.

Edit: I should add that I had been using Adsense since ~2006, when I was first banned. No big changes had been made to my website (one at the time), in the time before the ban. I never got an explanation other than the standard "illegal activity" message everyone seem to get.

[malka]

All it takes is someone who has 5 minutes to lose to writes a shitty bash script that will curl your ads in an infinite loop. That may be the 'illegal activity' reported. As for the bans occuring a few day before payout, I'd be prone to think that the automated checks for such activity are not run in real time, but at a scheduled time close to a payout. That would explain why so much bans happens before payout (well, excluding malice from google)