BERLIN, July 11, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Online advertising is a massive industry, with companies giving advertising networks roughly USD 500 billion every year to advertise their products and services to web users. One of the industry’s biggest secrets is click fraud – cyber-criminals generate fake clicks on ads, resulting in substantial losses for advertisers, and huge profits for the advertising networks and criminals.
Click fraud works like this: Criminals create websites and contact ad networks like Microsoft Ads to request publisher advertising accounts. These publisher advertising accounts allow criminals to place other companies adverts on their scam websites. The criminals then send large amounts of “bots” – software pretending to be human – to their websites to click on the ads. For each of these clicks, the advertisers pay fees to the ad networks, and the ad networks share the money with the cyber-criminals.
According to Trey Vanes, Chief Marketing Officer at click fraud detection firm Polygraph, criminals are stealing billions of dollars from advertisers every month.
“A typical click fraud gang will run dozens of websites, with each of these websites fleecing tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars each month from advertisers,” said Vanes. “Most advertisers are unaware of this, as they don’t use a click fraud detection service like Polygraph to monitor their clicks for fraud. As a result, they have no record of the fake clicks on…
