from
www.techcrunch.com
reprinted as fair use
How advertisers engage in click fraud
First, its hard to even see the ads in the first place. On search engines they are there on the parked domain page, or you see them when you type in a query. But on Facebook ads are hyper targeted to users based on deep demographic data - like single men who live in San Diego and like the Xbox and U2, for example. If you aren’t a user who fits that description on Facebook, you don’t see the ads.
So the bad guys just create thousands of fake Facebook accounts with a wide variety of demographic information. This sounds like a lot of work, but it’s highly automated. One advertiser told me how he paid $200 to an Indian operation for 2,000 Facebook accounts. Another said the going rate was just $10 per 100 accounts if you supply the unique email accounts. Once the accounts are created, they use software to fill out the varied demographic information, and that software also manages all these accounts.
The fraudster then logs in to Facebook via these accounts and views the ads that are displayed. The right competitive ads come up and Bingo, the software then clicks them. Facebook rules allow an account to click any advertisement up to six times in a 24 hour period, and all those clicks are charged. All you need is a few accounts to view the ads and then click to the max. Facebook even makes it easy to find the ads. They have an “Ad Board” that shows all ads targeted to that user (mine has 15 ads on it).
Often the fraudsters have their art down to a science and their software clicks ads so fast and moves on to the next one that it doesn’t even hang around long enough for the underlying URL to resolve. Facebook still sees (and charges for) the click, but the advertiser’s server never registers a page view. That’s what bugs advertisers the most.
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