Microsoft sues three people for 'click fraud'Microsoft has filed a lawsuit on Monday against three people accusing them of running a "massive" click fraud scheme that involved harnessing hundreds of thousands of IP addresses to target advertisers promoting auto insurance and the World of Warcraft on-line game. The company said in court filings that the lawsuit centers on a scheme to bilk competitors by clicking on their on-line ads. Typically a percentage of those clicks result in sales and cover the amount paid for the traffic. However, in the instance of alleged click fraud, no sales were made and the victim companies lost money. This type of activity also hurts the performance of the ads and can push them down in rankings, Microsoft noted. The lawsuit, filed at the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, is Microsoft's first for click fraud and the company is seeking at least US$750,000 in damages. Microsoft began the investigation on March 24, 2008, when it received an unusually high number of complaints regarding suspicious activity from auto-insurance advertisers that use its sites. There had been a large spike in the number of searches submitted that exactly matched the keywords on which the insurance companies had bid and within a short time the top search results were being clicked. It found hundreds of thousands of IP addresses were being used to disguise the true source of the traffic. On April 24, 2008, a similar series of searches and clicks occurred, targeting World of Warcraft advertisers. Subsequent cycles of suspicious activity were again detected in June, July and December of 2008. Microsoft said it had traced back the clicks in question to computers or servers run by Lam, who has links with both a World of Warcraft on-line store and auto-insurance advertising. Source
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