DONT DO CLICK FRAUD

Swindlers have stepped up their effort to fleece millions of dollars (euros) from online advertisers who use lucrative marketing networks .
The sales referrals generated by clicks on the brief advertising links popularized by the two Internet powerhouses are a sham 14.1 percent of the time, based on information collected from 1,300 online marketers.
The statistics jibe with other data asserting advertisers are paying a significant sum to Google, Yahoo and their partner Web sites for phantom shoppers even as more resources are devoted to thwarting scammers.
The motives for click fraud vary. Most often, Web site owners repeatedly click the ads on their own sites to generate money for themselves. In other cases, advertisers target the ads of their rivals to drain their marketing budgets.

Fraudulent clicking of Internet search type ads has emerged as a big problem. In addition to difficulty in distinguishing whether or not a click was fraudulent, it is difficult to pursue who after all did it. There is a move in the industry to work out common guidelines regarding fraudulent clicks but there is no definite solution is sight and there are publishers who admit that “it is realistic to think that some fake clicks will always be there”.
But the overarching problem is both hard to solve and important: How do you tell if there's an actual person sitting in front of a computer screen? How do you tell that the person is paying attention, hasn't automated his responses, and isn't being assisted by friends? This problem manifests itself in other areas as well.
For years, online computer game companies have been battling players who use computer programs to assist their play: programs that allow them to shoot perfectly or see information they normally couldn't see.
Playing is less fun if everyone else is computer-assisted, but unless there's a cash prize on the line, the stakes are small. Not so with online poker sites, where computer-assisted players -- or even computers playing without a real person at all -- have the potential to drive all the human players away from the game.
Look around the internet, and you see this problem pop up again and again. Standard testing doesn't work online, because the tester can't be sure that the test taker doesn't have his book open, or a friend standing over his shoulder helping him. The solution in both cases is a proctor, of course, but that's not always practical and obviates the benefits of internet testing.
Some websites are testing a new advertising model to deal with click fraud: cost-per-action ads. Advertisers don't pay unless the customer performs a certain action: buys a product, fills out a survey, whatever. It's a hard model to make work but it's the right security response to click fraud: Change the rules of the game so that click fraud doesn't matter.
That's how to solve a security problem
AND THE BEST WAY IS TO EDUCATE YOURSELF AND AROUND YOU NOT TO DO CLICK FRAUD AND HELP IMPROVE THIS INDUSTRY