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Microsoft files click-fraud complaint

Microsoft has filed a civil complaint in United States District Court in Seattle over click fraud and is seeking at least $750,000 in damages. The complaint alleges, that by engaging in a widespread scheme that generated invalid clicks on links to online ads that were displayed in response to search requests for the game World of Warcraft and auto insurances 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 damages to Microsoft, which has lost revenues and expended substantial money and resources to remedy the effects of defendant’s conduct. According to Microsoft, the company credited nearly 1,5 million US-dollar to auto insurance and WoW advertisers in direct response to the click fraud.

The complaint gives an example for click fraud: "An advertiser in a particular industry such as auto insurance that has a sponsored site appearing low on the result list could generate repeated clicks on the higher-ranked sponsored sites of its competitors to the point that the competitors’ advertising budgets were exhausted or the performance of their sponsored sites was dramatically lowered. This would cause the higher-ranking sponsored sites to drop off the results page or decrease in the ranking, and the perpetrator’s lower-ranking sponsored site to rise to a higher position in the sponsored site list."

  • Microsoft v. Lam, case number 09-cv-0815, complaint

Also see: The Register, Microsoft sues family over alleged click fraud

 

 

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