Google Agrees to Pay $90mln on Click Fraud Lawsuit

Hitokiri writes "Google has agreed to pay up to $90 million to settle a class action lawsuit 'Lane's Gifts v. Google'. The settlement stems from a lawsuit filed by Lane's Gifts earlier this year in an Arkansas state court and is designed to settle all outstanding claims against Google for fraud committed using its pay-per-click ad system back to 2002Google has made a statement on their blog."

Comments

Re:Wired had a nice piece a few months ago on this

[linguae]

The January/2006 Wired had an article titled "How Click Fraud Could Swallow the Internet" that presented a case study of a charter-jet service victimized by this ... turns out it was their competition doing it to use up their on-line marketing budget. Google Girl basically stonewalled 'em.

I want to post an insightful response, but Google Girl has stonewalled my thoughts.

must....post...insightful...can't...resist...

And in other news...

[DeafByBeheading]

Don't believe me? Try clicking *anywhere* on the blue ad box that shows up over results. Notice that a click even way on the right of it counts.

...businesses that advertise with Google are planning to file suit against jimmyhat3939, alleging enticement to commit click fraud.

Re:It's credits - not dollars

[zegebbers]

Maybe Slashdot editors (and this submitter) work for the RIAA accounting department in their spare time!

Re:Deceptive

[Afecks]

Honestly, RTFM poster.

What manual? Did I wander into a Linux IRC help channel?

$90mln?

[Trogre]

Since when have we been using mln to denote million?

What's wrong with calling 90 Megabucks $90M ?

Unless people are worried about conflicting with powers of two, but in any case that should be denoted: $90Mi, or 90 Mibibucks.

Or does mln denote "Millions of dollars worth of in-store advertising credit", which another poster has pointed out is what the plaintiff is receiving.

Re:It's credits - not dollars

[flyingsquid]

Hey submitter and editors -- Google isn't PAYING anything. They are giving credits to buy more advertising. Am I the only one who recognizes the difference between "getting paid $1" and "getting credit for $1 - at that company"?

Plus, if Google is clever, they'll get just some guys to click on the ads bought with credit and use up that $90 million in no time...

Re:It's credits - not dollars

[ensignyu]

Maybe the attorneys get credits too! Suddenly, the web is overrun by ads for "Need legal service cheap?" and "Injured by java api manual?"

Bidding prices for the adwords "lawyer" and "class action" jump into the thousands.

Lame

[Anonymous Coward]

Title says "Pay X", description says, "Pay Up To X", will the actual article say "Pay some amount which may be X".

mln

[meringuoid]

what is "mln" anyway?

n mln = (10^-3) * ln(n). It's short for 'milli-log-natural'.