I have an offer for you. Which is that I am capable of giving you 1000+ different traffic to your site per day - and all of them would click on all the Adsense advertisements. For all these clicks you would be able to earn a good amount per day. My offer is that I would give you that 1000+ different traffic to your site in exchange of 50% of earnings of their total clicks...
Sanjay Das

Tim points out that the fraudster doesn't seem too technically sophisticated - and given Tim's traffic and AdSense revenue, the fraudster probably would be caught. However, it doesn't take much sophistication to elude Google's current fraud detection. Many people out there assume that Google can simply track repeated IPs but it's not that simple.

Google can't easily detect click fraud patterns over time. If every one of Sanjay's 1000 clickers visited Tim's site once per day and only click 1 or 2 ads, Google would have a hard time flagging those specific clicks. Why? Because Google's fraud analysis system can't easily look at more than 1 hour's worth of log data in real time.

However, it sounds like Tim doesn't really have the traffic to "hide" 1000+ extra clicks a day, so it's likely Google would catch this fraud. Analysis of the payment side could raise a red flag as Tim's CTR and earnings would spike up too quickly if the fraud was put in place. Smart fraudsters would ramp slowly, and read a bit about Poisson distributions as they were doing that.

Of course, if I were Google, I'd set these fraudsters up with a honeypot, and then map the IPs...

¶ 5/17/2005