April 20, 2007 – (HOSTSEARCH.COM) – Web hosting provider AIT has uncovered a new form of click fraud, the company announced this week. The curious aspect of its discovery was that it was found inside its own datacenter.
“We have seen all kinds of techniques for committing click fraud, from its infancy of manual clicking to the more IT savvy software programs that automate the process of clicking on online ads over and over again with no purpose other than to receive a percentage from each click made or generated,” explained Clarence Briggs, CEO of AIT. “More recently, we have seen click BOTS which have become so wide spread and diverse that whole companies have sprouted up to help combat this growing problem.”
Briggs has given the latest form of click fraud the name the “Bang Box” scheme. “It is ingenious because it is so obvious that it is missed,” explained Briggs. Search engine affiliates host on web servers in a data center with an ISP. Then, according to AIT’s explanation, “the affiliate then gets fed advertiser ads from the search engines, syndicates and other IAB members to its web site. Then the affiliates hire a third party to rent a web server inside the ISP’s data center in order to ‘Bang’ or click on their affiliate site driving impressions or clicking on the ads themselves using an internal IP address without generating suspicious external traffic.”
AIT has often been in the news fighting click fraud and related issues. The company filed a lawsuit in Cumberland County North Carolina alleging the Fayetteville Observer (or Fayetteville Publishing Company (FPC)) committed online click fraud using the Bang Box technique. “The FPC rate card and other representations made by the Observer claimed they got 17,000 visitors a day to their website,” explained Briggs, “This is simply not true. We recorded and documented a few genuine visits a day but the majority of visits were manufactured by the Bang Box.”
AIT took action against Google with a class action lawsuit in 2005 and has worked with the FBI and Senate Judiciary Committee to fight click fraud. The company also started www.igeryon.com, a click fraud portal designed to inform the public and advertisers about click fraud.
