Adsense Click Fraud
This morning I noticed a strange phenomena. Every hour or less, one of a bunch of random IPs shows up at the site, loads a random forum page, then does a site search for “Female Impotence”, then vanishes. As a consequence, our cloud of “most popular searches” started to include the phrase - hardly a subject our average visitor cares about. The inclusion of this search phrase in our “most popular” prompted my investigation.
The range of IPs involved in this search is wide and random - over 156 distinct IPs so far. Most but not all of them are from overseas. Brazil, China, Germany, Hong Kong, Russia, Japan.
The user agents they use are variable, they are basically a typical zoo of internet explorer windows browsers.
The puzzle is that there is no direct value in getting into our cloud of “most popular searches”. It surfaces no external link. It results in no matches on the site itself. It provides no page rank boost.
So what could be the incentive?
One possibility is that the pharma industry has kicked off a skunk works campaign to create a new market for product that needs one. this article at the BBC dating from 2003 mentions a report in the UK that pharma is trying to build the market for a new “disease” that of course needs expensive pills. I am cynical enough to want that to be the explanation. But “google trends” doesn’t show the search term on their radar at all.
This blog post says that the phrase is in the top 50 most highly sought after (highly paid) adsense hits.
Then.. the penny dropped. This must be click-fraud. If adverts for pills pay $10 a click, and there were over 250 fetches of the search results for ‘female impotence’, which in turn requests a search block from google, and in turn an advert is clicked, then someone somewhere is out of pocket $2500 from just the hits on our site alone. If these browsers were engaged in 100 other site-based searches they could have racked up a quarter of a million bucks over the last 15 days. And I suppose we’ve been overpaid as well.
I have reported it to google. I have no financial incentive to do so: somehow I doubt I’d have seen a reversal of payments if I didn’t report it. In our history of using adsense the daily clicks and payments results in a check later on, with minimal if any deductions. Are their click-fraud systems so sensitive they avoid charge-backs even intra day?
Either way, I doubt this is the very first time we’ve been an unwitting participant in a click-fraud campaign.
Update: It occurred to me that it isn’t obvious who gains from this click-fraud. The answer is that it is likely to be reverse click-fraud. If you are competing for adsense placement and can’t out-bid a competitor you can just spend her into the ground instead. Aim a botnet at her adverts across a range of sites and either google will cancel the ads due to click fraud or (more likely) they will exceed their budget and the ads will disappear and your (cheaper) ads will appear in their place. Nasty business.