alt Hacker NewsIs it fraud for me to spawn a bunch of bots to listen to YOUR music? In fact, this has happened before, and people who are not involved at all get punished for the fraud that they didn’t commit. So it’s a quite tricky problem, and I agree that it just isn’t that straightforward.
This is a thing. You want to hurt someone's business? Buy a bot farm to engage in obvious click fraud on their account. Google or whoever will assume it's them doing it and shut them down, drop them or punish them otherwise. It's like a false flag operation. A superficial investigation will point to "who benefits? well it's clear who's doing this".