Pornographers Turn to Click-Fraud

By John P. Mello Jr.
E-Commerce Times

"The industry concern is that the more these ads are syndicated broadly, the more potential there is for click fraud," SEMPO spokesperson Greg Jarboe said. "You can see it pretty quickly if you're dealing with the major search engines, but when ads are appearing elsewhere, they become trickier to police."

Peddling smut has always been a lucrative business on the Internet Get Linux or Windows Managed Hosting Services with Industry Leading Fanatical Support., but apparently it isn't lucrative enough for some skin merchants.

According to a statement released yesterday by Kessler International (KI), a cybercrime investigations firm based in New York City, pornographers are turning to click-fraud to supplement income generated by their vice sites.

Click-fraud is a scam targeted at a popular form of Net advertising called pay-per-click (PPC). With PPC, an advertiser pays an agent a fixed amount each time someone clicks on an ad linked to the advertiser's Web site.

To distribute an advertiser's ads, agents often use affiliate programs. An affiliate has a Web site and agrees to post advertising from the agent there. When someone clicks on an ad at an affiliate's site, they get a cut of the money paid to the agent.

Ripe for Abuse

Since its inception, the scheme has been ripe for abuse. A business can gleefully click away on a competitor's ad knowing that with each click it's reducing the ROI of the competition's ad budget. Deceitful affiliates can repeatedly click ads to puff up their earnings. Hackers have even brought zombie networks into the act to automate bogus clicking schemes.

According to the latest numbers from the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO), based in Wakefield, Mass., click-fraud cost online merchants US$800 million in 2004.

And now pornographers are entering the picture.

Links Behind Naked Ladies

According to KI's statement, its six-month investigation into PPC programs revealed that some unscrupulous affiliates were linking dirty pictures at their Web sites to the sites of PPC advertisers, including family attraction parks, high profile law firms, children's toy companies and religious ministries.

Moreover, KI said, most of the porn bunko sites are displaying photos with subjects engaging in alleged incest without any references to the federal law requiring that models used in skin pics be 18 years old or older.

When contacted by the E-Commerce Times, KI's President and CEO Michael G. Kessler declined to reveal the names of sites that had been targeted by the porn click-fraud artists or the affiliate systems that were being abused, but he did explain the nature of the racket.

Database Access

"If you have people all over the world clicking on naked pictures and it's taking them to a legitimate site, all those people are going to do is back out of the site because all they were doing was looking for another naked picture," he said. "But when they click on that naked picture, it's registering somewhere as a click, and somebody is getting money for that click."

The investigator added that the fraudsters appear to have found a way to maximize their ill-gotten gains.

As part of its investigation, he said, KI set up dummy companies to buy PPC ads. The companies experimented with the amounts they paid for each click that led a visitor to their sites. A direct relationship was found between payments and traffic. The more a company paid for a click, the more traffic that was driven to its site from porn locations.

"We know for a fact that the porno site operators have a direct link to the databases of some of the pay-per-click advertising companies," Kessler asserted.

Scam a Week

One of the largest PPC operations on the Net is run by Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) Latest News about Google through its AdSense network. When asked by the E-Commerce Times if any of its advertisers had complained about their ads being hijacked by pornographers, spokesperson Barry Schnitt responded via e-mail:

"As stated in our Google AdSense policies, we do not allow sites with pornography, adult, or mature content into our network."

Nevertheless, the porno link to click fraud has been seen by others. Yoni Kahnrose, vice president for operations for Authenticlick, a click fraud auditing and recovery company in Los Angeles, told the E-Commerce Times, "We have seen instances of adult sites sending illegitimate traffic to clients such as law firms."

When told of the porn scam, SEMPO spokesperson Greg Jarboe was surprised. "That's a new development," he told the E-Commerce Times, "although in click fraud, new developments sort of come once a week."

He noted that the growing popularity of PPC has increased the capacity for click fraud.

"The industry concern is that the more these ads are syndicated broadly, the more potential there is for click fraud," he observed. "You can see it pretty quickly if you're dealing with the major search engines, but when ads are appearing elsewhere, they become trickier to police."

source: www.ecommercetimes.com