Paying the Bills: How Fraudsters Openly Advertise Click Fraud Services

[Man]

Is it possible to buy search positions? Yes, it is possible - both organic (dishonest promotion or honest payment for SEO work) and advertising. Why wait until natural and real traffic is collected, if you can not wait and buy promotion of behavioral factors for SEO? Or why optimize the settings of the advertising campaign, experiment with rates and creatives, if you can just click on competitors' ads?

In this article we will tell you why this is necessary and what to do about it. How to protect your ads from click fraud.

Contents
1. Open services for driving bot traffic
2. Bot traffic vs. performers
3. Do people really buy bot traffic?
4. How advertising platforms block bot traffic

Open services for driving bot traffic​

Developers of such programs and scripts openly offer their services: they can be found in search, social networks, messengers and other dark corners of the Internet with blackjack and bots. Competitors "hire" them to click on ads of competing companies or to cheat behavioral factors and improve their positions.

To make the traffic look real, scammers use VPN (proxy servers), unique IPs from hacked devices, and performers from exchanges.

What's what:

— 1. Search engine promotion

Such services are positioned as a method of search engine promotion of a website. Yandex and Google take into account clicks on the search results, analyze user behavior and increase the rating of a page or website if they satisfy user requests. The more clicks without returning to the search, the higher the positions. In this way, dishonest website owners or third-party agencies try to inflate those factors that can have a positive effect on the resource.

— 2. Clicking on ads

In advertising, click fraud works in the opposite direction: the more artificial clicks, the faster the advertising budget is spent and the higher the chances of losing advertising space. In addition, it increases the cost of a click and achieving a goal, spoils metrics, which can ultimately lead to making the wrong decisions.

— 3. Boosting views and other indicators

Bots are also used to boost views of everything that can be viewed: pages with banner ads, YouTube videos, CTV commercials, etc. Fraudsters also offer to use scripts to boost ratings on social networks and interact with other commercial, political, and socially important content.

In the screenshot above, we showed an example of a device farm. Attackers suggest using mobile proxy servers for cheating wherever possible, including on the Ozon, Wildberries, and Yandex Market marketplaces. When carrying out attacks, you can use different geolocations and change IP to simulate real visits and protect against blocking.

Initially, a click farm was a rented office, where performers worked sitting at simple PCs: they followed links from searches and interacted with sites. However, with the growing popularity of remote work, the demand for clicking contextual search advertising services began to grow. And now this has completely moved into the management of automated farms.

Bot traffic vs. performers​

In addition to renting bots to generate web traffic, there is also a rapidly developing industry of professional clicker services. If farms are one operator for many devices with one IP (or even automated software), then the latter are real users with unique addresses. Performers are sought on special exchanges - buxes, where tasks are posted.

It is more difficult to detect such traffic, since it comes from real users. However, the more experienced the performer, the more parameters he accumulates, which makes it easier to block him. Accumulation of cookies, search history, behavior on the site, device fingerprint - all this is used to analyze the visit and block.

Do people really buy bot traffic?​

In short, yes.

According to Statista, only 60% of web traffic between 2014 and 2022 was human. Indeed, the remaining 40% was generated by bots. According to other sources, the share of bot traffic on the Internet even exceeds human traffic: 39% versus 36%.

As for services for boosting clicks, views, transitions and interactions, a number of representatives of the business community are increasingly turning to the services of scammers to click on competitors' ads, improve their site's ranking in search or increase their rating in social networks.

These services are accessible, effective and easy to find.

How Advertising Platforms Block Bot Traffic​

Advertising platforms pass large volumes of advertising traffic. To analyze and block invalid clicks, they use multi-stage filters: automatic ones “catch” simple bots, manual ones — more advanced ones.

However, their filters are unable to cope with such volumes of fraudulent traffic. And even more so to detect smart bots or clickers.

To determine robotics, Yandex and Google analyze the following visit parameters:

• click/traffic source - where the user came from;
• User-Agent - to determine the browser and OS;
• website behavior - mouse movement analysis, scrolling, clicks, visit map, etc.;
• cookies — checking for the presence or absence of cookies. As a rule, bots for cheating behavioral ones preliminarily “build up” their profiles and accumulate the necessary cookies;
• IP address - used to identify IPs from which most requests originate. However, this is not the most effective parameter for determining the robotic nature of a visit, since attackers can change the IP of bots, use VPNs and proxies;
• bounce rates - simple bots tend to leave the site immediately after clicking on an ad, which increases the bounce rate, which may indicate that the traffic is robotic;
• site navigation speed - automated scripts are capable of "browsing" site pages at a very high speed.
• and other parameters.

You can only rely on filters of advertising platforms, however, as practice shows, they block only part of the visits. As we have told above.