Originally published February 7 2006
Pornographers turn to click fraud to generate profit
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Click fraud is targeted at the "pay per click" form of web advertising, where advertisers pay a fixed amount each time someone clicks on an ad. An investigation into PPC programs showed that some affiliates link pornographic images on family- or child-themed sites.
Pornographers are turning to click fraud to supplement income generated by their Web sites, according to Kessler International, a cybercrime investigations firm based in New York City.
Click fraud is a scam targeted at the popular form of Net advertising known as "pay per click."
An affiliate gets a cut of the agent's take whenever a visitor to the affiliate's Web site clicks on an ad posted through an agreement with the agent.
Competitors can gleefully click away on each other's ads, knowing that with each click they are reducing the ROI of their adversary's ad budget.
KI's six-month investigation into PPC programs revealed that some unscrupulous affiliates were linking pornographic images 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.
"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 told the E-Commerce Times.
The more a company paid for a click, the more traffic 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.
One of the largest PPC operations on the Net is run by Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) Latest News about Google through its AdSense network.
"We have seen instances of adult sites sending illegitimate traffic to clients such as law firms," Yoni Kahnrose, vice president for operations for Authenticlick, a click-fraud auditing and recovery company in Los Angeles, told the E-Commerce Times.
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