By Detlev Johnson
September 29, 2006
Even though they decline to prosecute, and no laws
may actually be broken, Paid To Read (PTR) gangs of
clickers now appear on the FBI's radar. It may be
usage of the word "fraud" in click fraud
that got their attention. Even purveyors of more traditional
click fraud exploits are getting worried. One Russian
programmer that sells a clickbot application even
quipped "You aren't going to send the FBI to
me, are you?" after admitting the primary use
of his clickbot is to cheat advertisers.
The problem originated with search engines that seem
to be overzealous in distributing their ads so widely
across parked domains and other low quality scraper
sites. The shame is that distributing ads to these
sites fuels the fraud uncontrollably, when the engines
could simply exercise more caution with whom they
choose for distributing their ads.
No one can stop click fraud from happening altogether.
Anonymous browsing, and the anonymous proxies that
enable it, is one of the fundamental ways to click
ads and go undetected. If your purpose is to earn
money with PTR, and you're careful enough, then you
can do so successfully and never get caught. The thing
is, there will always be anonymous browsing.
The search engines could choose to not charge click
costs from users that visit through anonymous proxies
or refuse cookies. They won't. In the meantime they
are making a mint. They cannot possibly detect even
the most basic anonymous browsing from competitor
fraud, let alone sophisticated methods that deploy
PTR gangs and a recipe that can make them impossible
to detect. It's not as if the search engines aren't
aware what they can do. Briefly, Google blocked Tor,
a peer-to-peer anonymizer, but that only lasted hours
or days. There's too much advertiser money at stake.
The search engines also count on the fact that you
aren't going to spend the time to go through the trouble
of finding bad clicks on your own. You would have
to spend the time to successfully argue for a refund
too. With stories like this one from BusinessWeek,
cases where the search engine's meager refunds were
awarded, their flimsy explanation that they didn't
charge for the majority of the fraud in the first
place is disingenuous, and the whole thing seems pointless
for all that energy expended. People have begun to
consider it just an unfortunate cost of doing business.
The problem is the search engines won't reveal any
real details at all. It is true they can't and shouldn't.
Sure, you can get a column of clicks from Google they
say were delivered and not charged against your account.
But in fact, all that really does is allow Google
to argue a smaller payout for you is appropriate after
their "investigation." It proves they recorded
clicks and did not charge you, but the real details
remain hidden by Google so they can tell you what
they want.
Hence the quagmire for advertisers that is favorable
for the engines. The only defense an advertiser has
is planning budget limits after a seasoned account
has built up some obvious norms for you. If you have
some runaway keywords, (ones you want to appear every
time a search is conducted), watch them carefully
for fraud spikes. Don't count on the FBI to do anything
about click fraud. The activity does not appear to
be illegal at this time.
Your only legal recourse today might be civil court.
For the most part though, those matters have largely
been resolved by the search engines already. Their
settlements for the past are in. There is little you
can do but be vigilant about fraud moving forward.
Be sure to consider supporting measures by Washington
that can address the issue, the same way spam legislation
has sent some spammers to jail. Then the FBI will
not only take notice, but perhaps take action as well.
