PPC-fraud already a daily occurrence?

Johannes Beus
PPC-fraud happens when affiliates click on ad-banners that they get paid for themselves. They need to constantly change their IP-addresses to not get caught, which seemingly happens through open Internet-proxies.
To see if this is already happening, we put up an open proxy at an unsused IP-Address for a few weeks and carefully examined the incoming traffic.
After only a few days, the first requests came through and a little over a month later, ads were being clicked on with each passing minute. There was one IP-Address speciffically, which did more than 1700 ad-clicks within the last month. Many of these were high-priced advertisement for casinos, direct-marketing and vacations.
We can assume that this fraud will increase manifold in the future and will force the PPC-providers to improve their filtering methods.

Johannes Beus

Johannes Beus, Founder and CEO of SISTRIX, has been interested in the optimisation of websites for searchengines since 2001. In 2003 he started to regularly publish summaries of his evaluations and share his thoughts on the SEO-sector on one of the oldest German SEO-blogs.
Johannes Beus - on Sun (07/04/2004) at 17:10 PM