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.
