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Fraud Bots Cost Advertisers $6 Billion

Posted by samzenpus on from the wanting-a-human-click dept.

Rambo Tribble writes A new report claims that almost a quarter of the "clicks" registered by digital advertisements are, in fact, from robots created by cyber crime networks to siphon off advertising dollars. The scale and sophistication of the attacks which were discovered caught the investigators by surprise. As one said, "What no one was anticipating is that the bots are extremely effective of looking like a high value consumer."

3 of 190 comments (clear)

  1. Re:How do the criminals make moeny? by alvinrod · · Score: 5, Informative

    Basically they host a website and sign up with Google or some other company to display ads. Google shares some of their revenue that they receive from the companies that pay to have their ads displayed. The people committing the fraud use scripts, bots, or some other automated program to fake visits to the site and clicks on the ads, which increases the amount of money the person running the site receives.

    Imagine it as if were a company that would pay you if you filled out a survey about your interests and you handed them hundreds of fake surveys in order to get more money.

  2. Re:I'll wager it doesn't actually matter by dunkindave · · Score: 3, Informative

    Except while the real advertisers will see a 25% payout reduction, the market will also see 25% of the ad expense budget from companies go to scammers. Not the best free market outcome.

  3. Re:I'll wager it doesn't actually matter by timeOday · · Score: 3, Informative

    Doesn't matter? tell that to all the millions of websites that get a 25% cut in advertising revenue because those with bot nets need to get their cut.

    You assume this is to divert ad revenues to phony sites? The article disputes that:

    "We found a lot of bots suddenly inflating the audience of websites we recognize that are clearly not being run by international organized crime," said Michael Tiffany, the CEO and co-founder of White Ops.

    Unfortunately, the article didn't get around to explaining why spammers would inflate ad impressions on legitimate sites. Are we so sure these legitimate sites aren't clients of marketing agencies that are paid to increase the clicks, never mind how they do it?