I hate to break out the tinfoil, but do you have any reason to expect the Ads team would admit to you if any of this were true?
Secondly, I'd be impressed if after the China incident, you still had access to Ads mailing lists given that you work in Search, so it at least seems unsurprising that your searches would reveal nothing.
hosay123, I've worked with the people this post talks about since 2005. Even though I'm the head of the webspam team, I'm familiar with how AdSense deals with fraud.
For example, I often see disgruntled publishers complaining on the web, and from time to time I've followed up on specific blog posts to get the other side of the story. In addition, the group that manually fights webspam at Google is a sibling organization to the group that fights adspam.
Finally, I passed these claims directly to the ads side and so far I've gotten three (now four) different "this is fake" responses from people I trust and have worked with in different capacities for years, including an engineer that I worked with in search quality who later went to work in ads.
I agree with Matt, the pastebin wreaks of someone wanting to be another Snowden but it's anonymous and has no documented proof to back it up. As such it has to be dismissed.
Furthermore, How do we know Matt_Cutts is even telling us the truth here? Not saying he is lying, but as he is a high ranking Googler, I doubt he would risk his career to confirm such a huge leak about his employer. It could very well be that Google has tasked him to deny any such information that could damage Google's reputation. Simply put, we cannot 100% trust anything that someone with a stake in the company in question says as the truth.
Welcome to the internet, all of the things you read here may or may not be true.
What is one to do in these treacherous times? The same thing you do with every other interaction you have with people. Weight the information provided with credibility factors based on context, delivery, bias, historical data about the source etc etc.
Either Mister Cutts has built up credibility for you over his many contributions, or he has not. That's your call.
It doesn't make any sense for ads team to lie. If the accusations are true, relevant employees can simply become a whistle blower, and collect bounty (i.e., a percentage of fine that Google will need to pay).
It'd require incredible certainty that any of this were illegal for an employee to risk their career going that route.. personally I'm not sure anything described in the pastebin is definitely illegal, but IANAL
Secondly, I'd be impressed if after the China incident, you still had access to Ads mailing lists given that you work in Search, so it at least seems unsurprising that your searches would reveal nothing.