After receiving yet another blog spam post today, I decided to dig a bit deeper. The spammer was trying to get a comment onto this blog presumably to increase the page rank of another site, http://www.kerago.com. This is one of those illegitimate websites that contains a bunch of garbage content packed with keywords, and then tries to get visitors to click on its sponsored links. Seeing this site got me wondering, if one started hammering the sponsored links in what would look like blatent click fraud, would Google shut down the website’s AdWords account? If this type of attack were launched a more legitimate site, the owners might be able to convince Google that they were not involved. However, since this website is already using shady tactics like blog spamming, its owners might have a harder time denying click fraud.This fake click fraud attack raises a number of interesting questions. First, is it illegal? The website owner has an agreement with Google to not click on their own links, but you as a visitor to the website do not. Perhaps if you wrote a script to send a very large number of clicks, then you might get hit with trying to disrupt a computer system, similar to what would happen if you ran a denial-of-service attack. If you just click on the links a lot, however, then how could that possibly be illegal? Second, would this be immoral? The issue leads back to the whole idea of vigilante justice. Someone else is harming you and others (spamming), so would retribution in the form of fake click fraud be justified? It is hard to say because you would not just be hurting the website owner, you would also be potentially hurting Google and the advertisers.The final question is: would Google actually shut down the website owner’s account, or just automatically filter out what appear to be fraudulent clicks and leave the rest of the website’s legitimate clicks alone? If the website owner claimed that they were not responsible for the fraudelent clicks and Google did not believe them, the owner could potentially take Google to court to get the money it deserved for legitimate clicks. It would be interesting to see who would prevail in this type of lawsuit.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 26th, 2009 at 7:40 pm and is filed under Spam, Fraud. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.