Security outfit Polygraph warns advertisers that click fraud is no longer confined to organised criminals, and many ‘legitimate’ companies are choosing to defraud them.
Click fraud is a sophisticated online crime where publishers use bots and trickery to generate fake clicks on the advertisements placed on their websites. For each phoney click, the advertisers pay fees to the advertising networks, and the money is then shared with the website owners.
Polygraph’s head of marketing, Trey Vanes, said that click fraud is now so common that it has become a regular part of the online advertising ecosystem.
He said: “No advertiser is immune to click fraud. Part of the problem is that most advertising networks are not doing enough to prevent click fraud. A major advertising network is not detecting click fraud, meaning the millions of advertisers using their service are completely exposed.”
Vanes said the type of people doing the click fraud is no longer confined to organised crime gangs and technically-savvy fraudsters.
“We’re seeing increasingly ‘legitimate’ companies doing click fraud. For example, we’re currently tracking two Nasdaq-listed publishers who are stealing millions of dollars from advertisers daily,” said Vanes.
“We know of multiple executives who are involved in this crime. We discovered the CTO of a major advertising company is generating thousands of fake clicks on the ads on his websites every day.”
Vanes said it is unbelievable that most advertising networks do not know how to detect click fraud.
“Click fraud would go away if most advertising networks made a bigger effort to detect it,” said Vanes.
