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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.""
> 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.
Thanks for the link to Google.
Does anyone have a mirror just in case?
------
beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his mind he dreams himself your master
Imagine a worm that infects machines that, instead of being an open email spam relay, surfs ad-heavy sites and simulates webclicks.
I use it for work... :)
All the torrents you could want.
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
Hopefully they've gotten that damn thing at least a few times.. he's always too quick for me
--Less Thinkin', More Drinkin'...
When people talk about "proprietary" or "patented" technology, do they think it will actually make their product look better?
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Last time I used google adwords, I noticed that they had a mechanism where ads that got clicked on a lot got some sort of karma points. So if you click on your competitors ads, it will cost them money, but maybe also help their ad karma. I don't know the specifics about this. Maybe it is a google secret. Does anyone else know more? My guess is the cost per click hurts a lot more than the karma gained in most cases.
Not that there's anything new about extending the non-meat product uses of spam, but I'm not sure it really applies to this. Most spam involves pushing your message at people in an automated (and annoying) way. This is about people sucking down advertising in an automated way. It's gaming the system to make money fast, annoying to companies like Google, but I don't see that it has the central quality of spam: in your face, over and over and over...
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Why would someone hire people to click banners when you could automate it?
You just need a bit of programming to parse webpages looking for Google (or other companies' ads).
Add some ip-spoofing (easy if the destination web server runs Windows) and make the program distribute clicks using some kind of probability distribution (for instance, a Gauss distribution), and it will look perfectly legal.
Indeed, if you find any ads company that still pays per click, and set some of those banners in a site of yours, you could earn a lot of money.
I described deeply this procedure in 1999 in a paper called Simulating hits to a HTTP server. Sadly, it is only in Catalan (if you have interest, e-mail me and I'll try to translate it for you).
the answer to one of the three cases in there is simple...the cost-per-click payment model is eventually going to go away...what's gonna replace it? i dunno...if i knew that, i could probably be a marketing exec for google...
seriously though...this doesn't solve the problem of judging how popular a link it, by how much traffic it gets (since much of the traffic can be false), but it does solve the "drive-by-clicking" technique that can cost companies money...
"Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true." - Homer Simpson
Here's an idea. Don't charge per click but per sale generated. The advertizer is happy, because he gets what he pays for. Google is happy, because the customer pays for what they get. There wouldn't be any idea in boosting up the click rate, and fraud would be virtually impossible.
Underholdning.info
Really, I've always thought that ad programs that pay per click were kind of stupid. The way to go is really affiliate programs. It makes perfect sense, don't pay people when their site brings people to your site, that's not where you get the money, pay people when their site brings people to your site and they buy something. Granted, this isn't a silver bullet because not all people that advertise are selling a product (or aren't selling one through their site), but for a lot of companies it just makes sense.
Ever hear of LWP?
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" 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!!
Oxford Dictionaries Online
No doubt fradusters will keep dreaming up more innovative schemes to get this done. I wonder if the Google API could be used towards this goal or in fighting it. Perhaps by setting up a Google Alert to search for fraud schemers, the good guys can stay a step ahead.
A significant number of ecommerce ad sites only do business with certain countries, and it seems like a simple and somewhat effective solution is to allow the company to opt not to pay for or receive traffic from countries outside their sales zone. In other words, a reverse ad block based on the visitor's IP address.
I work with a mail order business which does zero orders to third world countries like India, and it's no skin off our back of we were to simply "ban" our ads from India.
Go ahead! Slashdot them! That will teach them to steal ad revenues!
I didn't think the pay rate would be high enough to make any money by employing people to look at these ads, I mean if you automated it then it might be profitable,
Anyway, more worrying about this scheme would be false positives meaning some people were getting less ad money than they were entitled to.
Moving off topic (so stop reading now if that bothers you), there's a lot of extensions for Firefox and Mozilla (and probably other apps - not looked) that do things with Gmail including provide a new notification icon in your toolbar (weblogs.mozillazine.org/doron/), upload contents of a Mozilla, Thunderbird or any other mailer that uses the standard mbox format and probably tools to download Gmail and serve it to a regular mail client.
Currently these methods are unsupported by Google - in fact some violate their terms of service. It'd be good to see Google to make some of these extensions official and make Firefox the number one Gmail browser, I mean MS do this with Hotmail in Outlook Express and as Firefox uses Google as a default search engine then they don't have to worry as much about an IE service pack resetting the browsers default home and search pages to MSN.
Gmail users - you have a feedback option - in the top right click on help. In the new page there should be an option down the left for feedback.
What incentive does Google have to seriously reduce this type of fraud? The more clickthru's, the more they get paid!
You are thinking of Adwords, and ignoring AdSense.
If Google just let this happen, they would be saying to advertisers "you're getting screwed, but we're profiting, so we're happy." This might tarnish Google's saintly image and make people not want to pay them money.
You might as well say that cellphone companies shouldn't stop phone cloning, because if someone steals my identity and starts making calls to Nigeria, the phone company can bill me big time! But if they didn't do their best to stop the fraud, they would soon lose my custom.
Wow, just like what I do at work everyday right here in US, Surfing the web and get paid.
Seems Google has a kind of dilemma. On the one hand, they want to avoid all automated querying since it undermines their marketing model and perceived advertiser value. On the other, they want to build up automated third-party services (such as TouchGraph GoogleBrowser or GoogleAlert, both big users of the Google APIs). How are they ever going to be able to push advertising alongside automated queries if they can't even be sure that click throughs on normal queries aren't being faked? Or are they resigned to a pure pay-for-query model?
I don't make much from my Google ads, but it's fun to watch the stats. So when my stats tripled -- views, clicks, and cash -- at the start of May, I sent Google a note. No way did I want to be accused of click fraud, that $10 a month (oops, I shouldn't tell you that) takes the place of my dearly-departed CDNow affiliate kickbacks!
I got a nice form letter suggesting I check my referrer logs, but basically brushing me off. Understandable, if frustrating. What did I want them to do, say "OMFG WERE TOAST!"?
Strangely, though, the bump lasted exactly a week. May 1-7 had triple volume or more, then the stats settled down to exactly the pattern they've followed since the site's subject dropped off the face of the planet. I don't know if Google found the problem and fixed it, or if perhaps they were giving me catch-up credit for some previous bug.
All in all, though, they still look like the Good Guys. Hope it can last longer than CDNow.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
Ok, that wasn't fair . . . in all seriousness, this would devalue google's most significant revenue source by increasing the number of clickthroughs that happen per dollar revenue for the companies that pay for the ads. The bid price for clickthrough ads would invariably go down.
I'm surprised that Google hasn't been working on this problem harder, because if I remember from the article correctly, over 90% of google's revenue comes from ads. If Google fails to correct this problem, their whole business model may be destroyed (or at least crippled) by this problem.
It doesn't say who is paying whom for the clicks or where the clicked on links appear or who's the sucker or who's paying the people to click for bucks.
Both, probably.
On the one hand, you can get paid for "clicks" through to a victim site by the owner of that site (like Google ads). Or, you artificially inflate your marketing saavy by "demonstrating" all the traffic your site generates, so you get paid to host the victim's ads.
And it isn't trivial to write a program that will always behave like a person (in terms of browsing behavior); the amount of money that would need to be invested would probably cost more than these 3rd-world workers cost. I seriously doubt the people running these scams are interested in developing software themselves.
Besides, why "invest" in a scheme that'd probably be debunked soon anyway? Better to get in fast, steal a quick couple of bucks, and get out.
Unfortunately, that's also what will make fighting this sort of thing really hard: the ones "clever" enough to pull this kind of crap off will already have moved onto the next thing while Joe Copycat gets nailed for it.
Diplomacy is the art of saying, "Nice doggie!" until you can find a rock.
But that's me.
--- Ban humanity.
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.
Hard references, please! If you don't have any, then we know this is an urban legend. The big flaw in this theory is that it would be much cheaper and simpler to simply write a little program to send the HTTP requests than to have people clicking on links. It would be like paying people to copy text off of web pages when you could just print it out instead.
At what point do all these stupid marketers wake up and say 'Oh, gee... the internet was not created to be a worldwide marketplace, it was created to share information and we attempted to usurp it. Maybe we should have thought of that before we stuck our greedy fists into a network we didn't understand.'
I couldn't a shit less about the problems all these stupid marketers face. The Internet is meant to share information, it's not meant to be a global market. That's the reason you have all these problems with spam and abuse of the traditional marketing mechanisms - it's a system to share information with minimal checks and balances.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
Outsourcing would really work here! Only instead of outsourcing link clickers, perhaps they should outsource product buyers.
It's also an open secret that a number of Google Advertisers have had their accounts suspended and payments withheld because of "Fraudulent Clicks" on a website. Google refuse to disclose any details of what they think is causing the issue when this happens - I've been warned by Google about "violations of the Acceptable Use Policy" with absolutely no other detail as to what I'm supposed to have done. Any queries are met with canned replies. (They would not actually be able to get away with this in the UK or many other European countires due to the Data Protection Act and similar - they can be forced to give up any information they hold)
They are very much throwing the baby out with the bathwater -- it's perfectly possible to kill a rivals cash flow if they're using Google simply by running a bot to click on all the ads on their site. (I think this is what happened in my case) Of course, as Google present no evidence you can't then sue your rival.
I would immediately switch to some other advertising network if there was one available for smaller (~8-9 million hits a month) web sites in the UK. Sadly, there isn't - yet.
My approach to advertising is very black & white:
1. Corporations rip us off by lying to us through advertisements. If someone rips off the corporations with some ingenuity and stays within the law then good luck to them with my blessing.
2. I turn on my TV, there's adverts. I turn on my radio, there's adverts. I read a magazine or newspaper, there's adverts. I buy a DVD and at the beginning there's trailers (=adverts). Hell, I even fill my car up at the petrol station and if I don't look at the TV screen overhead playing adverts at me, I stare down at the petrol pump nozzle and on the 3" diameter circle on the top, there's an... wait for it... advert (usually for a bar of chocolate).
Hey, I'm a capitalist scum consumer just like the rest of you but if my girlfriend went on at me as much as advertisements do, I'd have left her by now.
My greatest fear is not death but arriving at the gates of Heaven only to see a "Sponsored by Coca Cola sign on them."
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Desireable search terms can go for $0.45/click. If you have a website that forwards clicks to google, you get a share of the revenue, which is what is driving the fraud.
One way to combat would be to compare the search rate from the website to the total hits on the website compare that ratio to hits on the google main page or to other affiliates. If 90% of the people hvisiting the website click on the ad link, it would be kind of suspicious.
Google would profit from but doesn't want fraud.
Advertisers don't care about clicks. They care about conversions. Advertisers want people to come to their site and then open the wallet. A conversion is somebody that came to the site and then bought something. Advertisers measure the success of the campain by the net profit. That means they track how many people converted and then figure out how much a click is worth to them statistically. If a campaign was sucessful, they want to continue the campaign. In the best case for Google, they want to expand the campaign or would be willing to pay more for the campaign.
While it might be in Google's short term interest to have fraudulent clicks, it is not in their long term interest. They will lose advertisers who have to pay for fake clicks because the advertisers are tracking it.
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!
Google ads can get very expensive. A dollar to several dollars PER CLICK. Would you like to do the math here?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
There are worms out there that make computers dial expensive premium phone services (phone sex and the like) using their modems. This is a godsend to the guys running phone sex lines... in the past, they had to (and did) break into phone line distribution boxes and install small electronic diallers (or pay a phone company repair guy to do this). Now they can just spread these things from the comfort of their own home. I still have a modem in my computer (for faxing stuff), but the phone line is disconnected when not in use. A normal virus might send my personal data (which is encrypted anyway), or trash my hard drive (which is properly backed-up), but this stuff might run up a god-awful phone bill. And no, phone companies will not refund any of it; they did not even do so in cases where rogue diallers were installed on people's phone lines.
I wouldn't be surprised if the operators of certain sites (usually with the more obnoxious and dubious ads) would stoop to such methods to boost their income from ads.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
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Personal pension schemes that promised better returns than they actually did...
Adverts for loans and car insurances that use glitzy imagery to divert you from the small subtext "they have to say" due to government regulation...
A racist Pepsi advert that portrays an Indian man as an elephant trainer - how cliched is that? - and even uses a fake Indian accent to his English...
Cosmetics that blatantly do not deliver the "age protection" they claim to...
If I looked more carefully I could find more examples but I genuinely avoid as much advertising as possible.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
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.
RELIVANCE and HONESTY. So many sites just slather any and every ad they can get. Well this has two problems: First, most of the ads are just for shit I don't want. I have no intrest in it, so I just start filtering the ads out. Second, and probably more importantly, so many of the ads are scam-like in nature. Punch the money and win, you have a waiting message, block popups (in a popup ad), etc.
/. once and a while) but only on Google have I gone straight to buying, and I've done so on many occasions. Reason is that the Google ads are completely relivant to what I want, so when I'm in buy mode, they instantly provide me with places selling what I'm interested in.
Well with Google's ads, espically the ones on Google itself, I find them highly relivant and honest. When I search for something, a list of companies that want to sell me that thing pop up on the right hand side. In fact, that's how I find shops to buy things, quite frequently.
I wanted a Bogen tripod. I had used them, and was quite happy with the quality. Problem: I do not know where one gets Bogen tripods. So I use Google. On the left was informational links, such as Bogen's own site, on the right was a whole list of pro video shops happy to sell me Bogen tripods. I browsed a couple shops, chose one, and bought the tripod.
Google holds the record for being the only ad provider that I've ever clicked through and immediatly bought something. Others I've clicked on for intrest (I do from
Wouldn't it be incredibly easy, and much more efficient, to automate this process?
Pay per click doesn't work either, isn't that the point of this entire slashdot article?
Newspaper/TV/Radio/Magazines advertising works just fine.
Or perhaps the only advertising medium should be spam? If that didn't work, nobody would do it, right?
-- it must be true, it's on the internet.