How are these sites getting traffic if all their content is plagiarised.

Google ranks them. They don't always catch them. Some bad guys scrape a site's RSS feed and get their version published and crawled and indexed before the original publisher gets indexed first. Even if that's not the case, you still get indexed and can get long-tail and "query deserves freshness" traffic until you get slapped.

The thing is, syndication is okay in the eyes of Google. It has a real purpose in real life and that's what these people are exploiting. Another method is popunder traffic, or tab-nabbing when you open a new tab and the original tab gets redirected to a trash news site, etc.

The true problem are the ad networks that are approving their sites. A lot of times these sites get added to an Adsense account that is already approved, where you can just add new sites and immediately get ads live without approval. My account is like that.

And that's all these ad networks want to look at, is whether or not you're still in good standing with Adsense, one of the largest exchanges out there. The other big exchanges should be rejecting these sites, but there's a lot that don't care, especially those that care less about the strict advertising and are more about dropping tracking cookies and crap like that.
 
The true problem are the ad networks that are approving their sites. A lot of times these sites get added to an Adsense account that is already approved, where you can just add new sites and immediately get ads live without approval. My account is like that.
Didn't that rule change some time back? Now every site has to be approved before ads are shown?
 
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