Yesterday, the strange story of the attempt to have my Google AdSense account disabled took another, strange turn. It seems my problems can be traced to an address in the San Diego area where a maid service referral agency operates. And, for some reason (as yet hard to fathom), that maid service has an association with cashontree.com and the Swedish heavy metal rock band Tristitia.
The amateur sleuths helping me in the discovery process include individuals in Canada, the U.S., Britain and Pakistan. None of them have anything to do with Construction Marketing and everyone involved knows me only through the AdSense association. (The maid service offers a construction clean up service. I cannot recommend it. For consumers the service has some terrible reviews on Yelp and a Ebay fraud complaint associated with maidcalifornia.com.)
The online world allows the creation of communities and relationships for evil and good where geography is a secondary issue.
As we put the pieces together, it appears the person behind cashontree.com (we have the individual’s name and can trace the domain ownership to a condo in Spring Valley, CA which sold for $130,000 in December 2008 but I won’t publish the specific information here) entered the business of purchasing recently expired domains including openhosting.org, which records show he obtained in late April, 2010.
We’re not sure exactly how the Swedish “doom” rock band fits into the story but forums within cashontree.com show links to all kinds of odd stuff. It appears the person behind this activity had hoped to set up multiple domains and then click on the ads from various locations to generate fraudulent AdSense revenue. Fortunately, Google caught him in the act and disabled his account. When I dared to post a questioning assertion on the AdSense Help forums, he tracked me down through my (then-public) profile on the forums and began the click-bombing campaign against this site.
The good news from this experience is that, at least from my perspective, there are more honorable than evil people on the Web and the Internet allows you to create relationships and friendships which transcend any conventional geographical or social boundaries.
While I doubt I will become a fan of Tristista’s music, the Swedish rockers and I now have common ground with a bunch of homeowners who called for a maid service in California only to discover things didn’t quite go right when the maids arrived, and an Internet scammer who decided to cause problems for me from the public lounge at the Hacienda Hotel near Los Angeles Airport.
He has failed, miserably. Rock on.