Pay-per-click advertising is a huge money-making business and accounts for a large share of the revenue for the internet’s biggest advertising providers. Google, Microsoft and Yahoo provide the best platforms for advertising on the internet with targeted advertising, the likes of which you cannot get anywhere else. However, as with any major industry, there’s always the risk of scams. How are Microsoft are dealing with recent fraud methods and who’s behind these scams?
Microsoft have just taken up a lawsuit against the C.E.O of RedOrbit Inc for Click laundering, as well as other suits against a collection of individuals involved in similar kinds of scams. This type of fraud hits the advertisers in the wallet and Microsoft is of course keen to sustain the integrity of their advertising forum AdCenter. in spite of click fraud being an ongoing issue for Advertisers, this case came in to the spotlight due to the unique nature of the scam.
In most cases, fraudsters only use botnets (a collection of software agents or robots) and parked sites to direct clicks to onsite adverts. However RedOrbit apparently directed the traffic to its own servers, where it scraped out the traffic referring information and replaced it with code which made it seem like traffic had come straight to the approved RedOrbit site. As a result all advert clicks seemed completely genuine.
Microsoft stated that they initially noticed the potential fraud in 2025 when hits from RedOrbit soared from a daily average of 75 a day to 10,000 a day. Microsoft’s first course of action from there was to set up some countermeasures to beat this kind of fraud. With measures now in place, Microsoft are confident of security but are keeping very quiet about the details due to concerns that others will use the information to get around it.
