Click Fraud Case Study: Google CliqueClick fraud has been around for a long time, and goes right back to the early days of pay per click advertising. In these early days low level click fraud was rife, but there were also some organized criminals trying to make it big. The search engines and other advertising networks have always worked against these large scale criminals, but that doesn't deter fraudsters from trying their luck There are many unscrupulous individuals around who are prepared to go to almost any lengths to profit illegally from pay per click advertising. Many of them go into click fraud to make money, but some of them are a little more enterprising. The example of Google Clique shows you just how low some of these people will go to make money. Google Clique In 2004, Michael Anthony Bradley created a piece of software called Google Clique, which he claimed could help scammers defraud Google's Adsense program by automatically clicking on links for them. He apparently used the software for himself, and sold it to other scammers, but he obviously felt that this wasn't enough money for him. He contacted employees of Google and tried to blackmail them for a hundred thousand dollars to take his software down from the internet. Bradley was, of course, arrested an charged with extortion, among other things. It seems that Bradley had also developed another piece of software, which performed a slightly different job. The purpose of this software was to click links on the competitors' sites in such a way that it looked as if they were committing click fraud. The plan was that Google would then ban them from the AdSense program, and the criminal would profit further from being the only active advert publisher in the area. It seems unbelievable that fraudsters should announce their acts to the very companies they are defrauding, but in this case that seems to be exactly what happened. What Can We Learn From This? In this case, there was a happy ending in that the fraud was stopped, but we should be aware just how shameless fraudsters are. They are criminals, and they do not mind what they do as long as it makes them money. It's important to realise the sort of people that we are dealing with. Many advertisers start on the principle of trust, and lose a lot of money before they realise that they are being exploited. Most activity in click fraud and on the internet in general is honest and productive, but the few criminals that there are put in a lot of time and effort to go after others. The most important lesson that you should learn from this as an advertiser or as a potential advertiser is that you need to take action to protect yourself from fraudsters. Technology to deal with these problems is moving forward very fast, and the best thing you can do right now to protect yourself from click fraud is to get yourself a piece of ad tracking software with click fraud protection. |
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| AdWatcher | 9.3 |
| HitsLink | 6.4 |
| HyperTracker | 6.4 |
| WhosClickingWho | 6.4 |
| DynaTracker | 6.2 |
| ConversionRuler | 6.3 |
| AdTrackz | 5.9 |
| AdMinder | 5.1 |
| ROIWiz | 5 |
| ClickAlyzer | 1.6 |
| ProAnalyzer | 0 |
