Yahoo Implicated In Spyware Click Fraud

[dutter]

Advertisers who expect their Overture ad campaigns to run with certain Yahoo Searches may be surprised to find their ads running in syndicated spyware applications that render each impression as an ad click the advertiser must pay.

When that click is paid, according to spyware researcher Ben Edelman, Yahoo and the spyware vendor split the revenue. Edelman has followed up his August 2005 research into spyware receiving payments from Yahoo's Overture by noting an increase in this possible syndication fraud.

"In my August syndication fraud examples, an advertiser only pays Yahoo if a user clicks the advertiser's ad. Not so for three of today's examples. Here, spyware completely fakes a click -- causing Yahoo to charge an advertiser a "pay-per-click" fee, even though no user actually clicked on any pay-per-click link. This is "click fraud," Edelman wrote.

Edelman documented three examples where actual click fraud took place. He named 180solutions, Nbcsearch, and Look2me/Ad-w-a-r-e as culprits in presenting popup ads that defrauded advertisers with Yahoo.

"Spyware syndication falls within the general problem of syndication-based click fraud. Suppose X, the Yahoo partner site, hires a spyware vendor to send users to its site and to make it appear as if those users clicked X's Yahoo ads. Then advertisers will pay Yahoo, and Yahoo will pay X, even though users never actually clicked the ads," said Edelman.

His examples of this click fraud are not guesswork and assumptions. For each case, Edelman provided a full packet log, annontated screenshots, and video of the spyware-based click fraud taking place.

A fourth example of nefarious practices taking place involves the practice of inserting pay-per-click links into text without the consent of the publisher. Edelman displayed one example of this, a story about Iraq from the New York Times website that had a third-party link inserted.

Edelman believes that Overture is the sole funding source for Qklinkserver.com, which inserted the link. He diagrammed the process that took place with this insertion:

(T)he net effect of these practices is that advertisers pay Yahoo, then Yahoo pays Intermix (Sirsearch), then Intermix pays Searchdistribution.net which pays Qklinkserver.com / Srch-results.com.

Intermix, the parent of MySpace, is now owned by News Corp. Intermix has been implicated in spyware schemes in the past, when the company was investigated by New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer's office before News Corp purchased it.

While News Corp has been publicly cleaning up MySpace, it may need to take a harder look at some of Intermix's other businesses. And Yahoo should be doing these types of audits itself, instead of waiting for Edelman or someone else to do them before correcting a problem.

[mrkdwg]

I believe I am a victim of this type of click fraud.
I normally spend $1500-2000/monthly w/Overture.
In Jan. and Feb. my account had a surge in activity
under the search term discount office furniture. $13,000.00 in 5 weeks. Overture does not provide transaction or invoice numbers on the e-mails when your account has been charged making it difficult to determine new and duplicate charges. In the beginning of March the search term cheap office furniture started to experience a surge a well.
I have asked Yahoo to investigate, which they did.
Yahoo claimed to have found no fraudulent activity, yet Yahoo credited my account $3700. Yahoo's reasoning was that an industry news related article was responsibile for the surge. Yet Yahoo has failed to produce any such article. At this point,
I have asked AMEX to investigate as well. Since this investigation has started, Yahoo has suspened my account, although there are funds in my account.
On March 1st I received over 250 e-mails from a response form om our site. Literally seconds apart.
Each response for had little detail and just one or two of the response fields was filled out. I cannot help but feel this is related. I have contacted legal counsel regarding this matter. I am still waiting to hear back from Yahoo legal. I would appreciate any info regarding this matter.

[dburdon]

Mark,

interesting observation. I've found Yahoo entirely dismissive of any clicks I've referred to them. On a smaller scale a little used term delivered 20 clicks from two very similar IP addresses in one 24 hour period.

In addition I was increasingly concerned by the amount of traffic that was coming from highly dubious search engines. The engines were UK based but all their traffic was derived from eastern europe, the middle and far east.

I've increasingly transferred my own and my clients' budgets to Google Adwords.

[blitzen]

I've been with Overture for years. Last year, I spent approx $300/week (depending on the season) on Overture. I didn't have Google Adwords at the time.

I could tell when my Overture budget was depleted because I got fewer inquires and sales were down.

I also noticed that being number 1, 2, or 3 wasn't financially good. I got better returns if my site wasn't right there at the top.

This year, I optimistically increased my Overture budget and started with AdWords.

As of this year, my sales are significantly down as compared with last year!

I would expect to receive at least some inquiries (I sell expensive products and generally my clients like to make contact before purchasing.) I receive no inquiries related to the new keywords I added, although the clicks from these services are substantially up.

31,406 clicks in Jan this year for "boomerang" and absolutely no sales. These are popular gifts for the holiday, but in January?

I terminated some keywords because they were generating thousands of clicks in a couple days. No sales and no inquiries. I was astonished at how fast the clicks were eating up my advertising budget!

I understand computers and software - I was on the Net (ARPANET) before the WWW existed. I am puzzled how Yahoo!, Google and others can claim that they can detect fraud clicks. A click is a click. What is to prevent someone from erasing cookies, having all their employees do some clicking during the day, and even the spyware from generating the clicks.

Think about it. What information is really available to the websites like Yahoo! and Google? Nothing more than available to me. This includes IP and the site the visited before and after visiting a particular web page.

I think that their great proprietary method to filter out illegal clicks is to watch the IP and the history bar. If the user clicks once then goes back to the search engines, that is invalid click.

However, if the user clicks the link and clicks more in the store, then that is a valid click.

That would be easy for spyware to program.

Okay, how about this? The IP is monitored. The same IP clicks the same link in the search engine more than once within, say a minute. That is registered as an illegal click.

But, I have software that can hide my IP. Then what? Can I indefinitely click and click and generate valid clicks?

What else can the search engine monitor to detect an illegal click?
Server Software? no.
How about Request Method? Not really.
The type of browser (HTTP_USER_AGENT)? no.

I recently read how Google settled out of court ($9M) for this very same problem. I won't get my money back. Google refused to make their methods transparent for fear that competitors will use it. Heck, wouldn't that be a good thing? To protect us?

The ONLY way to monitor valid clicks is to watch the user.

[Jabber_uk]

I must admit I have been reluctant to use Adwords or Overture partly I guess because of the uncertainty surrounding the idea. So far I have held back from advising my customers to use the services too. This topic unfortunately does not help my confidence.

Picking up on the comment from blitzen:

The IP is monitored.

You mention software to hide IP address. But there is also another point what if there are hundreds of individual users behind a NAT firewall? The 'Internet' would assume that this is one IP address. I have often told colleagues to click on a link I found "Search for xyz and the top Advert on the right has some cool information" (or something like that) ;)

Anyway my point there is that there could be a number of users clicking a link from one IP address so how can Google/Yahoo detect these?

I will continue to watch this sort of topic as it does seem a pretty crucial one.

Thanks

[diogohomem]

When using yahoo PPC system, the site www.bookingsonline.net had a lot of clicks but very few page vews.

An other thing that I verified is that the site had false bookings that had all been canceled some days latter.

[blitzen]

Good point about the IP, Jabber_uk. SE's may not use that as a standalone parameter.

The PPC might use a combination of enviornment variables to id a particular user. Monitoring only one variable can't very well id an individual. But, when you combine 3,4,5,6 variables, you have an array that can better identify the individual and track their movement on the web.

I was thinking about browser detection. My site stats software can separate the spiders and bots from users with browsers. That is probably because the friendly spiders and bots identify themselves. When they don't, my software id's it as a bot or spider when it hits on my robots.txt file.

The reputable browsers id themselves, too.

What if you wrote a spidering program that doesn't hit on robots.txt and doesn't id itself? Would this appear as a valid human click on a link?

I am convinced that my PPC accounts experience fraud click events. I have much data: my PPC reports, email logs of inquiries both by phone and email, and sales. If I can get this data compiled, it would be time for a statistician to get involved to make anything of it. I don't know statistics that well, that will be the hard part.

Regarding diogohomem's comment

When using yahoo PPC system, the site www.bookingsonline.net had a lot of clicks but very few page views.

Have you asked Yahoo! about this? I'd like to hear what they say.

[jpechlin]

Over the last few months I have been constantly reducing my bid amount for each keyword. I have moved from position 2 to postion 6 or lower, and my costs from Overture continue to increase. My ROI has dropped by 50% and I continue to get bogus click throughs all the way to my 'information request' page that is spyware. If there is a lawsuit pending I'm in!
I spend over 3K per month with Yahoo. I can't imagine the billions of dollars this company has made on this cpc business. There is no excuse for any type of fraud.

[moonraytours]

I just signed up for the yahoo deal a month ago and did a url submit to yahoo for my web site. When I do a search I get some links including this url http://www.veracart.com/test/mass_email.php
and what appears to be some sort of unauthorized mass mailing PHP from my account?????? anyone know whats up with that.

[dburdon]

In many respects the purveyors of pay per click services need people to believe that clicks and sales are closely related.

The more I've studied the subject, the more I realise that its just a few keywords that generate sales.

There will always be click fraud. Just focus on the terms that lead to real business.

[feal-martinez]

When Yahoo took over Overture I noticed a 300% increase in activity on the same keywords. I queeried this but as others have said Overture said nothing was wrong. I then got Adtrack a superb piece of tracking device software and was alble to rpovide detailed raw logs and with adtracks help I secured 2 lots of refunds. Someone really does need to look into the conduct of Yahoo over this. Re Google. I opened an account with adwords and now mange 7 sites for my brewery and have to say the click rate is stable, and proportionate to what would be expected. I am slowly removing sites from Yahoo when you are getting 15%+ apparent clicks it defied credibility. My advice is to go to Google and leave Yahoo well alone.

[advancedmerchant]

We feel we have seen this in action here. Yahoo's click-through ratio recently skyrocketed from an average 1.40% to 3.39%. Any SEO expert would tell you that you made a major positive change to your site, but we made none, and sales and applications have actually reduced lately, rather than increasing! We are actually watching as our advertising dollars go.. poof! It looks like Google is going to get Yahoo's budget until they cease doing business with spyware and false PPC companies.

We spend (used to) about $3000 per month on Overture. I have just moved 95% of that to Google, and reduced my spend per click on Overture so low that it is not worth scamming.

If all of us do the same, for long enough for it to appear on Yahoo's bottom line (perhaps a quarter), their shareholders will SCREAM.

Maybe we should declare 2Q06 as the "TEACH THE PPC INDUSTRY HOW MUCH THEY NEED US", and use Yahoo's recent exposure as an object lesson. Move all your PPC funds to other networks for the balance of the quarter, and let Yahoo explain their poor quarter to their shareholders.

[Cyrus255]

Originally Posted by dutter

Advertisers who expect their Overture ad campaigns to run with certain Yahoo Searches may be surprised to find their ads running in syndicated spyware applications that render each impression as an ad click the advertiser must pay.

Oh... I am *angry* now.

This kind of dishonesty is strangling the industry.

[dburdon]

Echoing Feal-Martinez's point I've just had another run in with Yahoo search marketing. This time they record 14 clicks for a little used term. My on page analytics systems records only 3 possible clicks for the same term.

Yahoo's stock reply demonstrates they pay almost zero attention to client concerns.

One of Yahoo's problems is the clunkiness of their reporting system. Effectively with Google Adwords your looking out of a rear view mirror that's 3 hours out of date. With Yahoo you can only get a good look at traffic when its a day old. Then its too late to pinpoint the possible fraud with any accuracy.

The second problem is the inability to switch off partner search engine sites. Along with good search engine partners such as MSN, there's an awful lot of dubious looking search engines.

In my opinon Yahoo Search Marketing needs some form of external audit.

[advancedmerchant]

Update: After moving 90% of our Y! funds to Google, sales are up, we just had one of our best days ever. Applications are up as well, and the call volume is up, with much more 'qualified' customers. Is this just a 'better' customer base? Or were our clicks so diluted by Yahoo's affilliates that we just were not seeing any sales? We intend to keep our major funds on Google, and just use Y! for PPC at prices that should be 'under the radar' and not worthwile for those guys at 180 solutions.

[dburdon]

I like Advancedmerchant's sentiment. Pay per click advertising is the goose that laid the golden egg of the 2006 boom for both Google and Yahoo. With new customers coming into the market every day, the two networks have taken established advertisers for granted.