| Harvey Specter | 06-16-2009 04:13 PM |
Quote:
Originally Posted by ecchiecchi
(Post 6468186)
=/ The posting of personal pics of these people is really getting childish. Do you have that much time to be searching everyone on facebook?
| Wtf are you talking about.....the facebook link and pictures were posted on the dvforums; I just copied and pasted what I read.
More information on the scam: Quote:
Microsoft sues Richmond trio over ‘massive click fraud scheme’
By David Baines, Vancouver Sun columnistJune 16, 2009 4:24 PM
Seattle-based software giant Microsoft Corp. has filed a lawsuit against three Richmond residents who allegedly perpetrated a “massive ‘click fraud’ scheme” on its online advertising network.
The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court in Seattle against Eric Lam, his brother Gordon Lam, and their mother Melanie Suen.
They live in a gated townhouse complex at 47-12411 Jack Bell Drive in Richmond. No one answered the door when a Sun reporter visited there Tuesday morning and telephone calls were not returned.
“By engaging in a widespread scheme that generated invalid clicks on links to online ads that were displayed in response to search requests on Microsoft’s network, defendants disrupted the advertising campaigns of their competitors, obtained increased user traffic for their own ads at a much lower cost than they could have otherwise, and caused substantial damage to Microsoft,” the lawsuit alleges.
The lawsuit alleges breach of contract, tortious interference with business relationship, fraudulent concealment, fraudulent misrepresentation and civil conspiracy.
Also named are two Delaware-registered companies the defendants allegedly used to register online advertising accounts with Microsoft. They are:
• Super Continental US LLC, which runs a website (www.WoWmine.com) that sells virtual “gold” generated and used by players of the hugely popular online video game, World of Warcraft.
• Super Continental USA LLC, which represents websites involved in auto insurance sales.
By way of background, the lawsuit explains that, to be displayed on Microsoft’s online advertising platform (called “adCenter”), advertisers bid for keywords relevant to their market, such as “airline tickets” or “cheap flights.”
When somebody who is looking for cheap flights types those words into Microsoft’s search function, unpaid results show on the left side, and sponsor-paid sites appear on the right side. When users click on the sponsored sites, they are directed to the sponsor’s website.
The higher up the sponsor’s ad is placed, the more likely it is to be clicked by a potential customer and a sale made. Sponsors obtain higher ranking by agreeing to pay more money to Microsoft every time somebody clicks their site.
“Pay-per-click fraud” occurs when a sponsor clicks on a competitor’s site for the sole purpose of exhausting the competitor’s budget and bumping it off the page so that its ads move up in ranking without having to pay more money to Microsoft.
Fraudulent clicks are generated either by “click farms,” where workers are hired to repeatedly click on sponsored sites, or through software programs that automatically click on sponsored sties.
According to the lawsuit, starting in March 2008, Microsoft received “an unusually high number of complaints of suspicious activity from advertisers in the auto insurance industry.”
“Microsoft investigators confirmed that a large number of exact match-type keywords were being searched, and within a short period of time, the top sponsored site results were being clicked, which indicated that automated or ‘click farm-generated’ click fraud was occurring on the Microsoft network.”
During the same period, Microsoft investigators discerned similar traffic spikes for “exact match-type keywords” in World of Warcraft-sponsored sites.
Microsoft investigators determined that Eric Lam was “uniquely involved in — and positioned to profit from — click fraud in both markets.”
This was unusual, because Warcraft and auto insurance are unrelated markets. Making the matter more unusual, Lam’s sites were not being hit by the onslaught of suspicious clicks.
Further investigation connected the fraudulent clicks to computers or servers registered to and operated by Lam, and to adCenter accounts linked to Gordon Lam and Melanie Suen.
The lawsuit claims that, to reimburse advertisers who were victimized by the fraud, Microsoft credited them with nearly $1.5 million, and spent another $750,000 investigating and addressing the fraudulent activities.
Microsoft is seeking damages against the defendants, an injunction preventing them from furthering their scheme.
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