BERLIN, July 15, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Click fraud is a massive problem, stealing tens of billions of dollars from advertisers every year. The fraudsters responsible for this crime include technically savvy website owners, transnational organized crime gangs, and even Nasdaq listed multinationals.
The scam works like this: criminals create websites, and contact advertising networks like Microsoft Ads to request a “publisher advertising account”. Publisher advertising accounts enable the fraudsters to place other company’s ads on their websites, with small fees earned every time the ads are clicked. To ensure maximum profits, the criminals create “bots” – software pretending to be human – and send them to their websites to click on the ads thousands of times per day. For each of these clicks, the advertisers pay money to the ad networks, which is then shared with the criminals.
What makes this crime extra devious are the efforts taken by the fraudsters to remain undetected. One of the tricks they use is ensuring their bots use different IP addresses every time an ad is clicked. To achieve this, they use “residential proxy” services to route the bots’ traffic through random internet users’ home internet connections, effectively randomizing the bots’ IP addresses, and making the clicks look like they came from normal internet users.
According to Trey Vanes, Chief Marketing Officer at cybersecurity firm Polygraph, this laundering of IP…
