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Google's Fraud Squad Battles Phantom Clicks

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the unfortunate-necessities dept.

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.""

29 of 313 comments (clear)

  1. Open secret? by Threni · · Score: 5, Funny

    > 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.

    1. Re:Open secret? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      > 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...

    2. Re:Open secret? by AuraBorealis · · Score: 5, Insightful
      You would hate to see it if commercially supported websites disappeared. I don't know what percentage of Slashdot's revenue comes from ads versus paying subscribers, but you'd better believe that all this bandwidth we burn up all day long has to be paid for by somebody.

      Ads are like taxes.. they support the things that people want to use but don't want to pay for.

      -B

    3. Re:Open secret? by will_die · · Score: 5, Informative

      For 2004 about 96% of Google's revenue has come from ads.
      Here is some more detailed info.
      Because of thier desire for the IPO alot of financial info is now available.

    4. Re:Open secret? by tomhudson · · Score: 4, Interesting
      You would hate to see it if commercially supported websites disappeared. I don't know what percentage of Slashdot's revenue comes from ads versus paying subscribers, but you'd better believe that all this bandwidth we burn up all day long has to be paid for by somebody.

      Ads are like taxes.. they support the things that people want to use but don't want to pay for.

      While this is true, it's also true that the best ads are those that either make people laugh or are innocuous enough not to piss people off.

      The pepsi ads during the super bowl are examples of the first

      The text ads in google search and gmail are examples of the second.

      People will find ways around ads that bother them past a certain threshold. Too many online advertisers think like spammers - in your face, if we piss them off it doesn't matter because they weren't going to buy our crap anyway, etc.

      Google's got it right. Small. Innocuous. Relevant to what you're looking for.

    5. Re:Open secret? by AstroDrabb · · Score: 4, Insightful
      There is a good way and a bad way to do ads. Google does ads right IMO. Simple and clear text ads. I block pop-ups and flash ads with Firefox. If someone wants to advertise to me, then it has to be on my terms.

      Imagine if a new "no change" bit was put on all tv sets so that when a commercial came on that you did not like, you were not able to change the channel? I have two little children and when smut tv ads come on, the channel is changed.

      There are too many pr0n and gimmick ads on the net. I don't mind targeted ads, for example, tech ads on /. I don't mind, though I don't care for graphical and/or flash ads and usually block them. Another thing to keep in mind with text based ads are that they are very hard to block, especially if the server grabs the text ad and sends down the HTML, then you cannot block by server such as *servedby.*.

      It is not the job of consumers to keep a business or business model afloat. It is the businesses job to make sure they are changing to meet demand. If most of the internet advertising companies stop with the spyware, popups, homepage jacking, etc and switched to plain text or simple HTML, there would be a lot less effort in blocking the ads and probably many more clicks on the ads.

      --
      If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
      it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
    6. Re:Open secret? by jc42 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Google's got it right. Small. Innocuous. Relevant to what you're looking for.

      Yup. Like most of the geeks here, I mostly use browsers that can do things like block images from sites, so as to cut down on the more obnoxious ads. But I've also bought a fair number of things online over the years. And when I'm looking to buy something, I tend to first ask google about it. Both the matches and the accompanying ads are useful in that case.

      Dunno how well it works with the general population, but google's approach is fairly good for people who are trying to find something and just get annoyed by irrelevant ads.

      We oughta let them know that we appreciate their subtler approach to the whole topic.

      In a few cases, commercial sites have asked me how I found them, and I've enjoyed telling them that I used google. That oughta give some of their marketing people a bit of a pause, since they probably "know" that google's approach isn't very successful at selling.

      --
      Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
    7. Re:Open secret? by Eivind · · Score: 5, Insightful
      Not at all. In the contrary, advertising has a lot of externalities.

      Let me make a example; You own property, you rent it out to a company wanting to put up a billboard. With this, you make $X profit. The company considers the effects of the ad-campaign worth more than they pay you, so they also come out ahead.

      However, the other property around your migth degrade in value as a result of the visually noisy advertising. Or the people passing trough every day migth consider the ads annoying and be willing to pay (in aggregate !) more to be free of the ads than your profit is.

      Summa summarum, a net loss, but the loss is on other parts than you and the advertiser.

      Other example, which more slashdotters will agree with;

      You hire me to send 1 million emails with ads for your product. The sales generated give you $5000 in profit, and I do the mailing for $2000, having costs of my own of $500.

      We both come out ahead, you by $3000 and I by $1500. $4500 in sum. Looks good, no ?

      Until you consider the loss for the 1 million receivers. If the sum of annoyances at the ISP and end-user exceeds 0.45 *cent* pro message, then emailing the spam wasn't really profitable. It only looked that way to you because you get the profits, and someone else carries the cost.

      If you think about it, this ain't rare in advertising, though rarely is it so blatant as with spam.

    8. Re:Open secret? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Exactly. I don't mind ads. What I mind (and tend to block) are ads that interfere with my ability to read the web site content that I want to read, or mess with my browser/computer working the way I want it to. This includes everything mentioned above (spyware, popups, flash, tracking cookies, etc.) as well as ad servers that can't keep up and stall things. I can't count the number of times I've been stuck waiting for some poor server at doubleclick to send something so that the page would finish rendering.

  2. Gee. by sentientbeing · · Score: 5, Funny

    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
    1. Re:Gee. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Here you go.

    2. Re:Gee. by houghi · · Score: 5, Funny

      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

      --
      Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
    3. Re:Gee. by crywolf · · Score: 5, Funny

      Google mirror

      --
      CAUTION: Product may be hot after heating
    4. Re:Gee. by Stuart+Gibson · · Score: 5, Funny

      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

      --
      It's all fun and games until a 200' robot dinosaur shows up and trashes Neo-Tokyo... Again
  3. Perhaps the next form of spamming? by Gentoo+Fan · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Imagine a worm that infects machines that, instead of being an open email spam relay, surfs ad-heavy sites and simulates webclicks.

  4. Golden opportunity by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    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

  5. I wonder how many times they've punched the monkey by stuph · · Score: 4, Funny

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

    --
    --Less Thinkin', More Drinkin'...
  6. Clicking helps their ad karma ranking by Rhett · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Clicking helps their ad karma ranking by myspys · · Score: 5, Informative

      the position for your adwords ads is based on CTR (clickthroughrate (%), as in clicks divided by impressions * 100) and the price you're willing to pay

  7. Automate it by paugq · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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).

    1. Re:Automate it by AssFace · · Score: 4, Informative

      With Google it is not as easy as some other companies out there.

      Google's code is placed on the site as a javascript include that then gets rendered to the screen at runtime when a browser executes it.
      That means if you have a script hit the page and get the source for it, all you get is the javascript include.

      If you write a page that onClick let's you view the content of the Google IFrame (the Javascript include dumps out an Iframe that then fills with a page off of Google), you will then see more of the code.
      They have several layers of javascript and none of the pages render out links directly, so it is hard to scrape them with a bot, since a bot only sees the source.

      You could load up the pages individually (outside of the iframe) and take a look at them, but it doesn't always work and also when you load that page, it sends back a reference to Google of what the site/location/name of the page you are loading looks like.
      So if you have a site ballsweat.com that has Google Ads on it so that you can look to see what the ads look like, as you start messing around with it to get a better idea, they will see that it is no longer showing up on the site and instead showing up on your hard drive (or if you like you can put it on your server and then they can read your code that you are using).

      That alone will tip them that you are looking into it - but then you could claim that it was someone else and not you (assuming it was on a drive), but then that could also mean that you just use someone else's site to test.

      So anyway, back to getting the data, you would have to load up the source, and then either parse the javascript and execute it to build it the same way a browser does (hopefully there are objects in Windows that let you simulate this and then dump the post rendered contents into a variable which you can scan - don't know about that),.
      OCR is out of the question since that is not going to get you the proper link (the links are listed, but the payment only goes out if you click on the link which first routes it through a Google site so it can register the click and track the stats and then redirects you to the site). When you mouseover it shows the regular site link, but that is done via javascript.

      Then you run the issue that Google would have to be retarded to just let a single IP crunch through a ton of ads everyday.
      So then you have to worry about spoofing - in this case it could arguably be blind spoofing - but the problem there isn't that you want to load web pages - that would actually work with blind spoofing (say I am computer A, and I want to tell server B that computer C is connecting to it, and that it should send the page data there), but the problem is again that it is only going to send raw HTML/javascript source down that connection and it is them going to drop off of that machine.
      So the site (Google in this case since you loaded a page and then "clicked" a link) registers the hit, but the page never gets rendered, so the Google page is never displayed and the redirect never happens - one could assume that Google is aware of this and wouldn't count that as a hit since the other page never gets loaded.

      So even if you could past all of that (heh, feels like shades of Oceans 11), then there is the issue that Google (technically it isn't Google, but a series of companies that they farm out the AdWords content - learned that from an investment bank friend that sat in on the IPO workings - yay) monitors this shit and looks for anomalies.
      So while you were getting 200 hits a 2 clicks every day for a month, if you all of the sudden are getting 2000 hits and day and 200 clicks, they are going to investigate your site.
      If nothing has changed to show that there should be new interest in your site (new ad placement, new content, etc) and they can do searches and see that there aren't any new sites pointing to you - then all signs point to you cheating.

      And then on top of all of that, we can show that a Gaussian distribution

      --

      There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
  8. Re:You saw it here first. by myspys · · Score: 4, Insightful

    and if the advertise doesn't sell anything?

    if they want to generate traffic to a page where you can download a paper which might generate a sale, which takes place via phone and take weeks to complete?

    if google switched over to CPA they'd lose a looooot of money

  9. Re:What incentive? by philbert26 · · Score: 4, Informative
    What incentive does Google have to seriously reduce this type of fraud? The more clickthru's, the more they get paid!

    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.

  10. sweet by ikea5 · · Score: 5, Funny
    "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.

  11. When I contacted Google... by RobertB-DC · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
  12. Is it a secret? Or simply an urban legend? by Junks+Jerzey · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  13. Except Googles approach doesn't work... by Excession · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  14. Re:To All The People Worried About Ad Fraud... by pandrijeczko · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Well I think we should all care since quite a bit of the net is driven by ads.

    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.
  15. Google would profit from but doesn't want fraud by DeadSea · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.