Google's Fraud Squad Battles Phantom Clicks

An anonymous reader writes "It's an open secret that low cost workers in India, China and other countries are hired to boost traffic for online ads by clicking on text links, banners etc. Internet marketers facing high advertising fees on search networks like Google are becoming increasingly concerned about this form of online fraud. This problem has reached a critical stage and even Google recognizes that it has been the target of individuals and entities "using some of the most advanced spam techniques for years". A Google spokesperson said the company has "applied what we have learned with search to the click fraud problem and employed a dedicated team and proprietary technology to analyse clicks.""

Comments

Open secret?

[Threni]

> It's an open secret that low cost workers in India, China and other countries
> are hired to boost traffic for online ads by clicking on text links, banners etc.

That's like 'common knowledge', right?

Anyway, I click on lots of lots of ads. The ones that make it through AdBlock, anyway. Shortly before I add them to my block list. I do hope I'm not skewing anyone's statistics. I'd hate for commercial websites to suffer.

Re:Open secret?

[Anonymous Coward]

> Anyway, I click on lots of lots of ads.

So tell me, have you gained those three inches yet? I, er, have a friend who was wondering...

Gee.

[sentientbeing]

Thanks for the link to Google.

Does anyone have a mirror just in case?

Re:Gee.

[Anonymous Coward]

Here you go.

Re:Gee.

[ziploclogic]

Couldn't find a mirror, but perhaps google's cache of google would prove helpful if it's /.'d

http://216.239.41.104/search?q=cache:zhool8dxBV4J: www.google.com/+&hl=en

Wait - if google's down...then can we still get to the cache? Oh No! What happens if the cache is /.'d?!

Re:Gee.

[houghi]

Thanks for the link to Google.

Does anyone have a mirror just in case?

Sure, no problem. The mirror is here: http://216.239.59.104/search?q=cache:zhool8dxBV4J: www.google.com/+google&hl=en

Re:Gee.

[Anonymous Coward]

MOD PARENT COWARD UP! He provided 584,000 mirrors!!!!

Re:Gee.

[staticx0085]

Anyone else notice this line in Google's cache of google.com:

Google is not affiliated with the authors of this page nor responsible for its content.

So Google isn't affiliated with Google anymore?

Re:Gee.

[crywolf]

Google mirror

Re:Gee.

[M. Baranczak]

No, but here's a translation.

Re:Gee.

[Stuart Gibson]

Hmm, from Google's cache of www.google.com:

"Google is not affiliated with the authors of this page nor responsible for its content."

That is shirking corporate responsibility if ever I saw it.

Stuart

Don't Slashdot Google!!!

[zxflash]

I use it for work... :)

Golden opportunity

[Anonymous Coward]

Google has a golden opportunity to avoid being snipped. Please deliver 40,000 advertising clicks now, or we will be forced to go through with our operation.

Best regards,

419

I wonder how many times they've punched the monkey

[stuph]

Hopefully they've gotten that damn thing at least a few times.. he's always too quick for me

Misread title (seriously - no lie)

[Anonymous Coward]

At first glance I thought the title read: 'Google's Fraud Squad Battles Phantom Chicks'

I must be new here.

Re:Perhaps the next form of spamming?

[Texodore]

Maybe the worm will get my credit card #, order Viagra, and ship it for me.

"No, honey, I don't know how this got here (boy I'm glad I didn't update my computer last week heh heh)."

So that's what I need to do!

[carndearg]

I quote the article:

" In certain sectors, such as travel, legal advice and gaming, the cost can reach several dollars per click.

Step 1: scrap my free software based www site.
Step 2: welcome to my FPS-holidays-for-lawyers website!
Step 3: Profit!!

Clickety-Click

[teamhasnoi]

I've found one of those companies that encourage their members to click on any and every link.

Go ahead! Slashdot them! That will teach them to steal ad revenues!

sweet

[ikea5]

"It's an open secret that low cost workers in India, China and other countries are hired to boost traffic for online ads by clicking on text links, banners etc."

Wow, just like what I do at work everyday right here in US, Surfing the web and get paid.

"e"

[HarveyBirdman]

I kill everyone within a 2 mile radius, and raze all the buildings to the ground within one mile.

But that's me.

Outsourcing would really work here!

[Chemisor]

Outsourcing would really work here! Only instead of outsourcing link clickers, perhaps they should outsource product buyers.

This Google thing sucks.

[Giggle Stick]

So I clicked on the link in the article to a page called google.com, and I have to say this site sucks. It looks like a 5 year old wrote the HTML. I guess it is a search engine or something, but come on, who would use a search engine that looks like that? I think I'll stick with Yahoo and Alta-Vista. All their pretty graphics and informative links on the front page mean I'm sure to get better search results than on this google thing. Please! This google thing will be bankrupt in a couple of months!

text mirror

[markov_chain]

(in case of slashdotting)

Google

Web Images Groups News Froogle more

Advanced Search
Preferences
Language Tools

Free! Manage and share your digital photographs. Download Picasa from Google.

Advertising Programs - Business Solutions - About Google

©2004 Google - Searching 4,285,199,774 web pages

Time to change Dixie Chicks.

[Anonymous Coward]

You could always change it to "Chixie Dicks" and get some of that hot tranny revenue.

Mozilla Plugin

[newend]

Does anyone know if it would be illegal to write a plugin that would automatically click the links on all popup pages, images of the generic ad size, and other frequent locations for ads? Then, the program would use idle bandwidth to just surf around on those pages and just trash the output? Ideally, it would have to wait some semi random amount of time say between 5 sec and 2 min before going on to a link (perhaps base it on the size of the page?). I'm sure this would be much more difficult to detect than having a large group of people from one area just click the same links over and over, and if you have a more spontaneous time you might not get detected as a bot. Another useful feature for this plugin would be to have it attempt to find products to ad to the shopping cart. (My understanding is that ad companies also collect this information). And if someone wrote a virus to add this code to IE through one of the numerous exploits, I don't think any company would be paying for Internet advertisements.