Google Adsense is taking every necessary step to protect its traffic to the websites. A new email scam threatens website owners with a flood of bot traffic to get their Google AdSense accounts suspended, reported by Brian Krebs on security.

By directing a large amount of bot traffic to a company’s banner ads, the scammers could trigger Google’s automated anti-fraud protection, which flags traffic that looks like “automated clicking tools or traffic sources,” as well as any attempts by ad publishers to artificially inflate impressions by clicking their own ads. Under Google’s policies, such actions could result in an ad being restricted until the matter is resolved, meaning few or no clicks on the ad, and less revenue for the publisher.

The scammers in the newest scheme promise not to unleash their bots on the publisher’s ad if the publisher sends a payment of $5,000 bitcoin. Brian Krebs shared an example of an email one of his readers received:

Very soon the warning notice from above will appear at the dashboard of your AdSense account undoubtedly! This will happen due to the fact that your site will flood with huge amount of direct bot generated web traffic with 100% bounce ratio and thousands of IP’s in rotation — a nightmare for every AdSense publisher. More also it ll be adjusted to  sophisticated bots to open, in endless cycle with different time duration, every AdSense banner which runs on your site.

So by temporarily boosting the traffic to an ad, the scam could potentially kill the ad’s future performance. Google had announced earlier that in an effort to protect the quality of its ad networks, it was “enhancing its defenses” to identify invalid traffic. The measures could include restricting an ad from being served if automated activity is detected.