Jim Edwards
Dec 13, 2017, 12:28 PM EST
Google is being sued by an ad management company, AdTrader, that claims it does not refund advertisers whose money is spent on invalid or fraudulent clicks.
The lawsuit is based in part on a surreptitiously taped phone call, in which a Google employee explains why AdTrader is being kicked off its DoubleClick Ad Exchange system.
In the call, the exec says Google will refund AdTrader’s advertisers for money spent on clicks that were in violation of Google’s rules, the suit alleges.
AdTrader claims its clients received nothing.
Google denies the claims.
A web advertising company named AdTrader, whose staff surreptitiously recorded a phone conversation with a Google executive, claims in a class-action lawsuit that Google does not refund money to advertisers when it discovers that those advertisers have spent money on fraudulent or invalid clicks.
If the suit is successful it could put Alphabet, Google’s parent company, under pressure to repay tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to advertisers whose money was spent on websites that Google later deemed broke its rules. The suit, citing a 2014 report, claims AdX generates $1 million per hour for its publishers.
