Help with trying to figure out what this is?

[acassim]

I've been using this forum as my resource into many aspects of creating a website, monetising it etc and I must thank every one that contributes to everyone's online journey to success! I don't post much and usually read and learn!

I created my website in July 2014 and this week I realised that my website is ranking on page 1 using the targeted keywords in the target country as well as on google.com.

I've just been posting a 1-2 articles a week and each one has been researched for keywords and then written by me. Did not use any techniques or blueprints or anything. Just doing loads of research on getting my site monetized using completely white hat techniques.

Anyway, my problem is someone somewhere in a land far far away decided to take all my content and images and everything else and has used it on 3 different domains including all my adsense ad blocks - all they did was change a portion of my logo and removed my shareasale ad widget. I only noticed it when my adsense earnings increased and saw the referring domain. Have dealt with that part by adding only my domains as the authorised accounts as I don't want to lose my entire adsense account due to this as I don't know what is the purpose of all of this.

I just need to find out what benefit would be derived from doing something like this? Is it click fraud or something else? I have been searching online to find out what this could be and I am quite confused. Note that I have absolutely no clue on how hacking works etc.

On one hand, it feels great that someone picked up on my small little site that only has approximately 20 views on any given day and decided that they want to clone it but on the other hand, I know that this is bad for my SERP's as it means there is duplicate content out there which means my websites page 1 is going to be short lived!