Yes registering fake views is fraud against ad networks. Ad networks love it though because they need those fake clicks to defraud advertisers in turn. Paying to have ads viewed by bots is just paying to have electricity and compute resources burned for no reason. Eventually the wrong person will find out about this and I think that's why Google's been acting like there's no tomorrow.

It is. Reddit is probably 99% fraud/bots at this point.

I doubt it's true though. Everyone has something they can track besides total ad views. A reddit bot had no reason to click ads and do things on the destination website. It's there to make posts.