Click fraud involves large scale clicks on ad links without the browser having any interest to use the product or services of the advertiser as a customer.
The internet crime of click fraud is common in pay per click fraud web advertising to generate additional charges for each fraudulent click.
Large number of clicks from one particular computer or a group of computers from the same geographical area is considered highly suspicious. Any individual making huge number of clicks alone from his machine is highly likely to be caught.
Experts who study online advertising estimate that in click frauds even as high as 10 out of 15 clicks may turn out to be fraudulent.
Click fraud is perpetrated in both automatic and manual (human) modes. Online robot or click fraud software is used to click on ads on the websites or listed in search queries. Low paid workers from developing countries are deployed to click on web ads. Employees of rival companies are also set to click on competitors’ ads to deplete their advertisement budgets and distort the feedbacks from the market.
Manually operated click frauds by human operators may be difficult to detect in the absence of any regular pattern, where people from different regions, widely dispersed, click on ads on different computer machines.
Policing technologies for click fraud tracking have now developed to report click fraud by analyzing surfing behavior pattern or web traffic logs, which flag non genuine traffic as suspiciously uniform. There are geo tracking systems in place to trace internet protocol addresses from where covert clicks originate. Any such click fraud generating computer source besides or in addition to the original perpetrator is a click fraud proxy ip.
In many states or jurisdictions like California click fraud is a felony.
Advertising and search networks have to make refunds to the concerned advertisers, who are victims of click frauds, even from a back date when such fraud is discovered.
