Leslie Walker reported in the Washington Post last month:

Google has repeatedly pooh-poohed click fraud, contending that it is a minor annoyance that it has under control with automated detection technology. At a meeting with analysts two weeks ago, chief executive Eric Schmidt said click fraud “is not a material issue.” Co-founder Sergey Brin said such cases amount to “a small fraction” of Google’s ad clicks.
But six days later, Google surprised analysts when it agreed to settle an Arkansas class-action lawsuit by setting aside $90 million worth of ad credits to advertisers that can show invalid click charges dating to 2002.

The article is about Radiator.com whose click fraud auditor [quote] “ClickFacts Inc. estimated that 35 percent of the referrals that Radiator paid Google for stemmed from bogus traffic. Likewise, 17 percent of the leads that came from Yahoo search results were illegitimate.” [unquote]

As reported in previous posts, click fraud thrives, as seen in the projects commissioned at the freelance sites, and it was probably very easy to perpetrate back in 2002. I look forward to hearing more reports of how bad it is in 2006. Would any click fraudsters care to comment?

Jason Lee Miller has written an interesting article in WebProNews as a follow up to the class-action lawsuit filed by Lane’s Gifts and Collectibles in Arkansas against Google. The plaintiffs’ lawyers will apparently receive $30M! The preliminary settlement awards advertisers covered by the suit just 0.5%.

Here is an interesting customer looking for a programmer to build a click fraud tool (I think):

I need a VERy VERY strong/expert custom click fraud program. This program should work, undetectable and pure random.

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It would be a good project for someone working for Google AdWords/Yahoo Search Marketing or MSN AdCenter to monitor.

Just after saying that there wasn’t any suspicious activity of late, an AOL visitor appeared to click a few times on the 14th. Google has recorded only one click, so no real harm done.

This is more of a non-post, only because my tiny PPC account has not noted any click fraud of late. I am not complaining. Perhaps sites that show evidence of a click fraud service tracking code are being avoided by the organised click fraud gangs?

The blog writer at FrozenNorth.org has posed an interesting variant of click fraud, which he describes as an electronic tip jar. Before AdSense, some web sites used to encourage visitors to click the ads and visit the advertisers but as this contravenes the AdSense ToS, a publisher cannot openly encourage clicks. I don’t see such use of AdSense as being any more of a tip jar than, say, its use on any other publisher page.