Why is a site I've never heard of (and don't own) showing up in my Adsense reports?

Question

Last week a registered a domain (call it my-domain.com) and put some Adsense ads on it.

Today I noticed that in my "sites" report, I have 3 rows - www.my-domain.com, my-domain.com, and a third row which is a domain belonging to someone that seems to be a computer programmer in Italy.

There was even a click on that site which apparently in contributing to my revenue.

What's going on?

Did someone in Italy hack into my Google account and set up a page with the code from my Adsense ad, in an effort to make money for me?? That seems unlikely but I can't really think of any other options...

Answer 1

You can control which domains your Adsense ads will appear on and count as revenue from the Adsense control panel. You probably want to do this in order to prevent problems.

As to what happened, it's probably from someone scrapping and republishing your site. At least that's where I've seen this happen.

Answer 2

You better block his domain in the Adsense dashboard. Most likely he scrapped you site and took everything from the code including the adsense code.

You can get your account banned if not careful.

Answer 3

It's obviously possible that he typoed his adsense tracking code, otherwise i have no idea how that could have happened. It's just a string of numbers, so i would think a typo is fairly likely.

Answer 4

Well, as a visitor, he could be spoofing his Referer: header on every request.

Maybe in the hope of getting listed by wordpress gadgets that publish stats about referers, or just to nag website owners, advertising networks, and profilers.

Don't take it personally.