Google Got Sued For Click Fraud

Friday 1 July 2005 @ 4:23 pm

Google
Click Defense Inc, a click fraud protection firm, filed the suit in California in the name of an unknown number of plaintiffs for an amount not less than $5 million. This law suit was filed in US District Court against Google alleging breach of contract, negligence, unjust enrichment, and unfair business practices due to the click frauds suffered by their advertisers.

Quoted:
Colorado-based Click Defense, a company that specializing in procuring rebates for advertisers, says the average cost per click is 50 cents. Disputing the 20% estimations, Click Defense alleges that click fraud on Google is as high as 38%.

The 18-page documented lawsuit claims that since 99% of Google’s revenue comes from advertising, Google has a huge financial interest in doing little about the instance of fraudulent clicks and criticizes the search giant for failure to disclose its own estimate of the number of fraudulent clicks.

Click Defense argues that the same software Google uses to track the number of clicks on an advertisement and then bill advertisers could be used to investigate and identify instances of click fraud but Google isn’t doing enough to prevent the problem.

Anyway, as usual Google spokesman denied the claims.

Quoted:
“We believe the suit is without merit and we will defend ourselves against it vigorously,” a Google spokesman told Reuters.

From this law suit, it’s no surprise more strict actions will be carried out by Google to prevent click fraud. So blogger who is using Adsense, please do NOT simply click on your own Advertisement, otherwise you’ll get banned by Google very soon.

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