Massive Click Fraud Operation Exposed
Click Fraud is the largest concern for both search engines and advertisers when it comes to PPC advertising. This is because it represents the largest threat to the system as a whole and because it is fairly safe to say that as long as there are paid clicks, there will be click fraud. The only thing that can be realistically done when it comes to click fraud, is keeping it at bay or to a minimum, and developing better ways of detecting it. This effort, however, now seems a lot harder as one of the largest and most sophisticated click fraud operations was unveiled.
Anchor Intelligence, a click fraud monitoring service, has just exposed and shut down a click fraud ring operating out of an extensive network in China. The ring, known as DormRing1, consisted of thousands of publishers who created websites and generated fake ad traffic on these sites with the purpose of defrauding ad networks and advertisers. In other words, the fraudsters set up websites and signed up with ad networks, then clicked on the ads to trigger pay-per-click payments. Nearly 2,000 advertisers were affected, with a total of roughly $3 million in fraudulent clicks over just a two week period. Anchor claims that the ring involved more than 1,000 people who set up more than 10,000 websites to spread out the fraud, making it very difficult to detect and litigate. It is believed that tech students were recruited across China as many of the sources came from student dormitories in places such as Shanghai Technology Institute.
This kind of operation represents a new breed of sophisticated click fraud that will be much more difficult to detect. While conventional methods rely on IP addresses and click behaviour to identify fraudulent clicks, this becomes increasingly difficult when clicks are coming from a huge network of different IP addresses. Anchor observed 200,000 different IP addresses in this scam. It is also believed that this huge network was only made possible through social networking sites, where people were recruited and hired to make the fraudulent clicks. Monitoring social networks for signs of large fraud rings could be one alley to pursue in preventing this sort of scheme. One thing is for sure, the fight against click fraud just got a lot harder and newer, smarter means of fighting it will be needed.
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