The Hidden World of Click Fraud - Before You Start Screaming
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This is not happening only in Lagos; think Mumbai, Bangladesh, Calcutta, Shanghai, Pakistan, and Peru. I think the only reason you are getting this information is because I am currently in Lagos. What I am saying is, this is a global phenomenon, not a Nigerian one.
Others Speak Up
When I asked him from where he got the idea, he casually mentioned a name I knew very well (all hearsay, so I cannot provide the URL). The site is probably the biggest on all things Nigerian; apart from that, I had been privy to reviewing the early versions of the site. The graphic designer I interviewed was even more cavalier. According to him "the advertisers have huge budgets, a few hundred dollars will not really hurt them," and anyway "Google keeps most of the money."
Head still spinning, I spent the evening with my colleagues reviewing our strategies for bringing traffic to our current blogs and sites, and sharing ideas on content management systems and programming. And coincidentally Adsense came up, A particular site makes thousands of dollars monthly from Adsense (it is targeted to Nigerians). The owner of the website almost dropped out of university since he was making so much money off Adsense revenue alone. Whether the clicks from his site are honest or not is, again, a matter of hearsay.
It was not only in Lagos. In Ibadan and Abeokuta too, webmasters who spend all their time reading about ways to generate money off their sites create Adsense accounts on their site (one intended to start one on a client's site he was administering). They are virtually untraceable; they host either on virtual servers or pay online web hosts with Master Card or Visa. The Google payments are made to associates (since Nigeria is not on their list of pay out countries) and there are no reported incidences of a scam website being pulled off the Adsense network by Google.
Profit Sharing
For more developed scam rings that specialize in sending fraudulent emails, the click fraud scam is a sideline means of generating income when business is slow. The ring (often made up of teenage males and their girlfriends) gets a friend to build and upload a site for a low fee (perhaps 200 dollars) and then goes clicking on slow days, with an agreement to share the profits when the check comes in.
Next: The Search Engines React >>
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