How to Stop Click Fraud

Interesting tutorial about why click fraud is, how to detect it, and how to stop it with Michael Stebbins.

Click Fraud 2.0

Harvard Business School Professor Ben Edelman recently revealed a scary new form of click fraud that solves the classic question plaguing all click fraudsters: how can we cover up the basic fact that advertisers will always be charged for their ads while seeing no uptick in sales?

To make a complicated equation simple, one company (the example company is TrafficSolar.com) makes a deal to host Google PPC ads with Google affiliates, who then place their own ads on other websites. Then Traffic infects the surfers machine with spyware so that, when it visits various e-commerce websites like Expedia, the spyware throws up an identitical, full-sized window in front of the real website that is a mirror image of that website. Unsuspecting shoppers make purchases as if everything is normal, not knowing that the e-commerce site is actually losing money. In order to bring up that second, "fake" window, TrafficSolar stimulates an invisible click on an ad with one of its original fraud affiliates, allowing it to receive a share of the PPC fee paid by the advertiser. Because the advertiser is still receiving customers and making sales, it is incredibly difficult to catch or understand the fraud.

For more on this new development in click fraud, check out this Forbes article from January 2010.