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Click Fraud

Modern web advertisements are pay-per-click, and some of those clicks are rather expensive: over $100 at the upper end. Upon seeing such a large figure charged for something as small as a single click, the natural question is whether there is anything to prevent people from abusing the system. For example, it would be rather easy for Google or any other ad host to generate revenue by simply writing a script that clicked advertisements over and over.

As a matter of fact, it has been done, and the practice is called “click fraud”. In order to keep the value of its ad hosting up, Google implements a system of filters that try to detect and filter out invalid clicks so that advertisers are not charged for them. However, not even Google’s safeguards are impervious.

 

Google’s first-line defense is URL-cloaking. It hides the real URLs of advertisements behind additional layers of code so that click bots can’t just parse the URLs and then hit them over and over to fake clicks. Nonetheless, a recent paper outlines an automated method for bypassing URL-cloaking, which the author claims Google has been aware of since 2013. Of course, URL-cloaking is not Google’s only defense. There are also statistical algorithms that discard what are deemed to be invalid clicks in real time– these can be bypassed by bots that imitate the behavior of normal users, according to the paper’s author, but they do place some sort of limit on the amount of bogus traffic that can be generated without suspicion, which is better than nothing. Google will also make investigations into purported sources of bad clicks on the request of advertisers, and will blacklist known sources of fake clicks.

https://thestack.com/security/2015/09/28/google-adsense-click-fraud-iframe-blazquez/

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1509.07741v1.pdf

https://www.google.com/intl/en_ALL/ads/adtrafficquality/index.html

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