it's usually a lot more involved than that, very often even after the site goes live, they still have the redirect in place, only it's limited to the ip range for Mountain View California.
And I wonder: does Google staff its ad division with simpleminded trusting folk who just fell off the turnip truck?
I have a friend who's reported blatant violations of the AdWords policies against (1) sending people to a page full of other ads; and (2) ultimate landing pages on very different domains than displayed.
He's sent screenshots. I can trivially reproduce what he's reported from my home consumer DSL. But then after his report is forwarded around a bit at Google, he just gets the response back, "we don't see that."
Gee, ya think maybe the scammers are identifying Google IPs and sending them what they want to see?
Google even asked him for an outside proxy they could use for testing!
