 |
What Will We Do About Click-Fraud?
From Wired.com, electronic version of Wired Magazine:
Click Fraud Threatens Web 10/13/04
Distressing quote from the above article:
So where is the FTC? In recent months, the agency has found the resources to take on funeral homes in New York and Massachusetts, settle a price-fixing case with a New Mexico physicians group and handle a $1.6 million judgment against a porn operator that billed Americans for multinational internet access without their consent. But it hasn't done anything about click fraud.
Although Eileen Harrington, director of marketing practices for the FTC, says the agency is always interested in the integrity of advertising, click fraud "isn't the most direct form of consumer fraud," since "consumers aren't directly affected."
All affiliate webmasters must write a letter or email similar to the one that I wrote below and impress upon the FTC that click-fraud IS a serious issue and must be treated as such:
Dear Ms. Harrington,
I hope that you or your office can assure me that the above quote attributed to you in an article entitled "Click Fraud Threatens Web" on wired.com on 10/13/04 was taken somewhat out of context. If the above represents your actual attitude toward the tremendous problem of fraud being employed against performance based paid advertising on the Internet, you have issued an assurance to a varied, world wide legion of wily criminals that they can remain confident they have chosen a stable and safe career. Additionally, such a nonchalant attitude will embolden criminals toward even more parasitic behavior in an incipient industry which has already reluctantly accepted massive fraud as simply another component to be factored into the cost of doing business on the Internet.
The "consumer" isn't directly affected by a large number of crimes including embezzlement, tax evasion, insurance fraud, check forgery, insider trading, etc. yet law enforcement does not allow these activities to run rampant and unabated. With each of these crimes, of course, the consumer is "indirectly" affected over the long term with higher prices and lost tax revenue which ultimately result in higher costs being passed on to consumers. Well, the same argument can easily be made for what wired.com refers to as "click-fraud".
Over the past few years, during a period of high unemployment rates throughout the country, even the government acknowledges that when job growth does occur, much of it is in the area of "self made jobs". Typically this entails the unemployed person creating a job by going into business for themselves. It should be obvious to all that the relatively recent introduction of the Internet has been the vehicle which has made a large amount of this job creation possible. An entirely new array of opportunities continues to emerge as innovators and technology advances allow the Internet to play a greater and greater role in much of the world's everyday activities.
Similar to the proverbial sidewalk apple carts seen during the Great Depression, many small scale entrepreneurs have emerged reselling and marketing products and services in Internet venues ranging from Ebay to setting up shop reachable via Internet advertising carried by search engines.
First, the people most actively engaged in these activities are consumers themselves, at least when they earn enough to be able to "consume" and contribute positively to the unrelentingly sluggish economy. Second, when such individuals have to see up to 50% of their advertising budgets lost to fraud (as an expert on the subject alleges in the wired.com article), that cost is spread among all consumers in the form of higher costs throughout the chain of manufacturing, distribution and sales as prices must rise all around to compensate for the sinkhole that so much potential profit is lost to.
Granted, getting a handle on the problem of click-fraud is daunting since it is complex by nature and little understood even within law enforcement. It also crosses jurisdictions worldwide which hinder proper enforcement of current law.
However, given the fact that the mammoth amount of hard earned dollars lost to these schemes surpasses percentage wise the amounts traditional organized crime felt it was prudent to skim from various business ventures over the years, it behooves law enforcement to ensure that click-fraud is a punishable crime that will be pursued with sufficient resources devoted to fighting it. Quite frankly, click-fraud falls outside the limits of what a regulatory organization like the FTC can devote to it.
First and foremost the sellers of click based advertising must be held responsible for making every effort to ensure that paid advertising is backed by some value, meaning the click came from a real consumer with the potential for making a purchase. The same technology which makes click-fraud possible can develop the resources to determine patterns that can track the source and nature of click behavior.
Yet unless the sellers of such advertising are compelled by the force of law to ensure the integrity of those clicks, one can't help but cynically note it is advantageous for the advertising seller to not look too closely at the origin of the click. After all, the seller will be paid whether it was generated by a paid "army of clickers" or a click spoofing program.
Secondly, those who engage in the click-fraud themselves must be held accountable. While it is often not possible for one nation's laws to punish another nation's criminals, methods could be put into place to stymie fraudulent clickers wherever they might operate from. Similar to postal codes that identify regions of the world, IP addressing schemes used on the Internet are dispensed regionally and knowing ones IP address isolates a computer to a certain part of the world.
If a sophisticated analysis of clicking patterns were employed it could be determined that an inordinate number, frequency or other identifiable pattern of clicks could indicate that a source of click-fraud has been located. Certainly if the average small business website owner can (and usually does) analyze their own logs to determine traffic patterns, any company selling advertising should be able to employ heuristic methods to isolate certain tell-tale behaviors.
The next step would have to be a radical one and perhaps temporarily unfair to some legitimate consumers. Search engine services selling advertising would have to forbid access to their search portals to suspect ranges of IP addresses. Unfortunately, this would ensnare innocent consumers too. However, these locked out folks would have to express righteous indignation to their own governments to adapt policies which make proven click-fraud a crime and give the "armies of clickers" some incentive to avoid criminal charges by their own country. Once such efforts began to yield success, bans could be lifted and click-frauders would be treated as the common criminals that they are.
So please, Ms. Harrington, do not act so dismissively about a problem which has had a profound impact on the livelihoods of countless hardworking entrepreneurs throughout the world. The crime of click-fraud is not as exciting as some of the other recent FTC successes cited in the wired.com article, and its methodology may seem arcane to the average person not "directly affected" as you indicate, yet it deserves the full attention of law enforcement. If this is beyond the purview or the resources that the FTC can give to it, your organization must pressure law enforcement to treat these criminal acts for exactly what they are.
Perhaps it is time to update Mark Twain's enduring axiom about theft to "Much more money is stolen with the point and click of a mouse than ever was stolen at the point of a gun".
Detailed Analysis of Click Fraud
Service All Affiliate Networks Should Employ
'A Best Web' Affiliates Forum
Federal Trade Commission
Help Those In The World Who Need It Most
Support the Fight Against Breast Cancer
Send E-Mail to: vigorelle@vigorellefacts.com
Copyright © 2005 Vig. All Rights Reserved