Re: can someone explain? (follow the money)
I was meandering along here to ask much the same question.
All this talk of "costing" and "defrauding" - who is making the money?
Is it the web sites which are making locations on the page available to advertisers? If so, web sites with suspiciously high click rates and/or detected high bot activity should be at least "grey listed" and not have their accounts settled without further investigation.
Is it the advert resellers who are bumping up their hit rate so they can charge the product advertiser (and for a win/win then refuse to pay the web site because of "suspicious activity")? Be interesting if the ad brokers didn't charge their clients or refunded money if they detected "bot" clicks.
Is it the botnet herders who are being paid by the above plus for the "revenge clicks" to cost competitors money?
Who is being defrauded?
The ad resellers?
The product owners who pay the ad brokers?
If the people making the money can be clearly identified then they surely should be the ones being targeted. Nothing really in this article to say where the money goes eventually.
Still, the original concept of "pay per click" is a real temptation.
You will pay me every time someone clicks on an advert on my website? Oh, really? Hmmm....and me with scripting experience and access to a few servers and PCs? Sounds too good to be true.....
After that it is click scripts all the way down.
Edit: I suspect that it much like SPAM - nobody likes it but people are consistently making money from it and the cost of policing it falls on the people who are NOT making money from it (or losing money from it). So no real incentive to stop it.