Google has announced that with immediate effect it will permanently ban any AdWords advertisers that place scam or malware ads. This news may be taken in combination with the news of the Senate report discussed above, the FTC prosecutions pending in Minnesota and the Facebook/Scamville events of the last couple of weeks to illustrate that deceptive ads have reached critical mass online, and people are actually starting to do something about it.

For Google this marks a big step away from its traditional algorithm-based fraud prevention, and it’s being done at client level rather than web site level, meaning that they will make every effort to shut down any accounts and campaigns that they believe are associated with an offender, not just the offending campaign itself.

This means that advertisers will need to take much greater care moving forward. Run one campaign that direct-links to a malware site and you could be booted off AdWords forever. This is a drastic step by Google and it’s a sign that they’re feeling heat from competitors, customers and just maybe the Feds.