Welcome to the new TimYang.com

Monday May 16

Proposition from an Indian ad-clicker

India has spawned an innovative business called ad clicking fraud in which thousands of Indians are paid to click on a website's Google ads in order to increase the website owner's revenue from Google for each click. And the Indian ad clickers get a percentage of the take. Here's an email exchange I had earlier this week with a representative of an Indian ad clicking syndicate.

12 May

Hello,

I got your email address from your site by Google search, while being interested in Adsense. At present you have 12 Adsense advertisements on your site. I have an offer for you. Which is that I am capable of giving you 1000+ different traffic to your site per day - and all of them would click on all the Adsense advertisements. For all these clicks you would be able to earn a good amount per day. My offer is that I would give you that 1000+ different traffic to your site in exchange of 50% of earnings of their total clicks. If you are interested, please let me know.

Thanking you, Sanjay Das.

So they use Google to search for people to defraud Google's customers? Ironic deliciousness! Sanjay was at least smart enough to limit the offering to about 1,000 clicks to help keep under Google's radar. And trusting enough that his customers would provide accurate revenue numbers. I thanked him for his offer and stated this was fraudulent and I wasn't going to risk my Google Adsense account. Google is aware of this business and can track it (however unlikely as that was). Sanjay was quite persistent.

13 May

This is known, but can they track if 1000+ clicks takes place from different PCs ? Also the clickers would load your site by pasting your url in the address bar from their clipboard, so there would not be any referred URL shown in your and Google log. Would it bypass the Google tracking ?

Sanjay Das

Sure, it's not as if Google would notice my site suddenly getting an uncharacteristic surge of ad-clicks from Indian ISPs. So I pose an obvious question to Sanjay (I'm being a bit of a jerk since both of us are clearly aware the current number of ad-clicks on my site are so meager they're negligible). I ask him "How would I be able to distinguish the difference between income generated by one of your clickers and one of my regular visitors? I assume I only pay you for income generated by your clickers." To which he replies:

14 May

Well that will not be a problem, if you engage in the deal. If I am correct, then, I think, you may not have enough clickers of the ads per day. My clickers would not be from any "referred" websites. Your traffic are from some "referred" sites. This way we can differentiate. Besides I would be very flexible about this once we have a deal. 1000+ clickers are too many. In my next step, I can increase the clicker traffic to 5000+ per day.

Sanjay Das

And later he adds:

Of your 1000 visitors, how many click on the ads (Is it 1+% ?) ? Can you give an average percentage, for the periods you are in the Adsense ? My 1000+ visitors are such that each person would click all the Adsense ads on your site. Additionally I can give you IP addresses of each of my visitors to your site. This can be a way to differentiate. I don't know how is the log of the Adsense, but I can give you a helping hand to differentiate my visitors from your visitors. All you have to do is to give me a secondary access to your logs, by either sending me the saved log page (as MHTL) or by sending me snaps of the log pages. What I will do is to hire a student to do the job of differentiation. Once we resolve the technicalities, we can go ahead.

Whoah, Nellie! Sanjay didn't know that Google doesn't provide logs with IPs. If they did, the Indian ad-clickers would go out of business. The ad-clicking syndicate doesn't seem to be run by the technically-proficient but by the entrepreneurial. It wouldn't help if he had a thousand students analysing logs, there isn't any data to analyse. (Ralph from fantomaster.com adds that this indicates ad-click fraud has gone mainstream.) Either way, I'd had enough and forcibly turned Sanjay down. I was sincere in my offer to pass on Sanjay's details if anyone here is interested in retaining the services of an Indian ad-clicker. You can write to him at freeuploadedfiles-at-gmail.com. But Google-fraud is Google-fraud.

Share this article on del.icio.us // Comments [18]

Comments

Wow that is very interesting. Google doesn’t provide logs with IP’s, but do they actually store the data? I’d imagine they would.

Yet more indication, if any were needed, that click-fraud is endemic. Why do people use it?

BB

I dont know why this article is giving more importance to the word “Indian”. It will give an false appearence that Indians are doing fraud business.

What’s false about it? Apart, of course, from the lamentable ommission of the click-fraud coming from China.
Point really is the disparity between mean incomes here (UK and USA here) and there (India and China there) is that it makes it financially feasible to run this kind of a scam and make a profit at it. If you went down London’s East End and suggested to the cheery residents therein that they sit clicking at a keyboard all day for a bowl of rice and a poppadom they’d laugh in your face. When they remembered where they’d left it. But in the outskirts of India and China, where a bowl of rice goes a long, long way, financially it all makes sense. it’s a sad thing when even basic villainy has to be outsourced. Sign of the times, squire.

BB

Wow!

Oh now I remeber why I turn off my content targeting in India. ;-)

John

All I can say is that in my opinion, this is a speck on the tip of an iceberg.....

I feel the only REAL solution is for PPC providers to have tracking on ALL of an advertiser’s pages, if not complete access to the advertiser’s log files. With schemes like this they will need to have access to the logs of many sites to detect patterns.

Perhaps someone could start a trusted company that would be able to give advertisers privacy, while providing PPC systems the data they need to fight this...?

I’m not so worried about India, or other countries, heck we are starting to block access to all our sites from the countries that are generating scams and abuse. No, I’m more worried about those that HAVE technical ability in the US and other “friendly” countries.

If I were running a clickfraud business I would fire up Charon and and use the Firefox proxy switch extension. Google would never know what hit them or where it came from.

There is a lot of talk about India becoming such a great Information Technology nation, because of the cheap labor. This is the flip side of that cheap labor. Clicks from people in these poor countries would not be as valuable as for people from rich countries. They can’t afford to buy anything on the Internet. Then why should an advertiser bother to pay top dollar for such traffic.

Do you guys have any other countries you negative match that we should be aware of?

Thanks,

John

As an advertiser on the Google network, I find this kind of activity very much disturbing.  This will either make us fully retract from content advertising, or keep an eye out on the location of referers...and the quality.

Hello Yang,
Interesting proposal from the Google-Ad clicking syndicate. Well, Its not really that easy to track them down, if they use Proxy servers, gateways and anonymity stuff. Just like Brian quoted, it would be almost impossible to nail them.
I guess Google has look into this pretty seriously to protect the Advertisers and their basic interest of promoting their products. Just as Das said, 1000+ clicks which turn out to be fruitless clicks for the advertisers, and I guess the advertisers have to pay for the clicks. If this fraud gets big and bigger, advertisers would lose potential, and eventually would be out of business.

And I wanted to say how brilliant Yang converted this issue into potential business.. I’m sure you would be getting traffic from most of the web news oriented sites. Good work Yang!

Guys and gals I am not sure if you realize this but most search engines do geo-targeting.

These Indian fools can click till their faces turn purple and the clicks will go to the advertiser’s site but the advertiser is NOT charged for them, unless the particular engine is purposely allowing click fraud to take place.

You making a mountain out of a mole hill.

As an advertiser the rising reports of click fraud is disturbing, Google is the new High St/Mall. I’m just a small business and even an ad cost of $300 per month is about all I can afford - so the clicks may render the whole thing useless. One simple thing Google could do to improve the meritocracy of SERPS is to bring some order to getting sites into DMOZ, which is so important but subject to whims and corruption.

Hello everyone.

I am Sanjay, being talked about here and by Tim. What mistake Tim did in understanding is that he mentioned (he thought) that all the clicks on adsense ads would be from India. It’s not true. The clicks would take place from all over the globe. I do not have any network of people who would just click. Rather its sheer hard work of abour 12 hours perday to make 1000+ (even 5000+) clicks on adsense. It produces 1000 bucks for work done only - no gimmick. Let me know if you have any question.

Sanjay

And running this all through a Gmail account. “The cheekiest man in the world award goes to...”

It’s give sound us that All indians are farud

Geotargeting doesn’t help much if the fraudsters are using proxies or can remotely access accounts in other countries where they can perpetrate fraud.

this fraud system seems to undermine an otherwise highly effective ad platform, what a shame! but i find it a bit ridiculous only to pinpoint towards india or china. nobodys doing that for a bowl of rice, gimme a break, and not every indian is engaged in fraudulent business, this “friendly country” “bad country” thing is a bit too narrow sighted, and sadly becoming a characteristic for the ethnocentric viewpoint of many in the US. but back to the topic: If you’re fast you can click 500 ads an hour. if we take a min. PPC price of 10 cents that makes fifty bucks/ 2 = 25 $ for the fraudster. I think at these perspectives such a budiness would not only be interesting for “poor indian students”.

Trackback URL for this entry

Trackback Click Fraud From the Inside

Tim Yang reports on his recent e-mail exchange with a representative of an Indian ad clicking syndicate. While his contact proved fairly clueless, it does constitute a clear indication that the concept is trickling down into mainstream petty crime....

Trackback Publisher Propositions from AdSense Ad-Clickers Goes Mainstream

TimYang.com reports about an email exchange he had with Sanjay Das, who promised him 1000+ untraceable AdSense clicks on his ads, which could be upped to 5000+ clicks if he so desired. You can read the full account here, but...

Trackback Proposition from an AdSense Click Fraudster

Tim Yang has a post on TimYang.com regarding India new innovative business where thousands of Indians are paid to click on a website where Google AdSense ads reside. How does it work? Read the following email sent by a representative of an Indian ad...

Pingback Wer wird denn gleich… Google bescheissen? :: DenkZEIT

...beschäftige ich mich ein wenig mit Google AdSense. Deshalb fand ich Proposition from an Indian ad-clicker auch eine recht interessante Lektüre. Ist schon erstaunlich, was in anderen Ländern, auf Grund niedrigster Löhne, so alles machbar ist. 1000 Clicks am ...