Here’s a great real-life story by Paul Middler at The China Game to show how people try to get away with not doing their job in China:

In the case of Google AdWords in China, I have a story. One supplier I worked with was advertising its products to “the world”, but the ad reseller wanted to show that the advertisement was getting exposure, so what the reseller did was “turn on” the advertising so that it showed up on searches conducted inside China. In other words, when the factory went online to check its name in Google, because the advertising was targeted to China, it showed up. But the ad was not set to show up in the US or Europe, where they had prospective customers.

Now, I’m not on the PPC side of things, but I’m fairly certain with the average American (how many times have I had to explain what SEO is?) this could be done as well to show up in the US, but not in Europe or China, but claim it was being shown there as well.