Earning on click frauds remains popular. Figures constantly rise

As the economy slumps further phishing and other types of cyber crime are rising. Click Forensics, a company that has been specializing in monitoring and preventing internet crime since 2006, reports the highest level of click fraud for the fourth quarter of 2008. The figures reveal that 17.1% of all clickthroughs on web advertising are the result of click fraud - the act of clicking on a web ad to artificially increase its click-through rate.

Last year in February the agency reported that 16.6% of all clicks on Web ads were fraudulent. Thus the situation never improved since that time and on the contrary we can see a 0.5% increase. What is significant, click frauds are aggravated by the involvement of botnets. According to Click Forensics ‘traffic from botnets was responsible for 31.4% of all click fraud traffic in the fourth quarter of 2008. That's up from the 27.6% rate reported for the third quarter of 2008 and the 22.0% rate reported for the fourth quarter of 2007.’

By means of click frauds web sites can increase their revenue from ads supplied by services such as Google's AdSense or the Yahoo Publisher Network. Even though Google and Yahoo! are screening out bogus links so advertisers don't have to pay, the reports from Click Forensics show that one out of every three clicks on a Google or Yahoo ad is fraudulent. The percentage of fake clicks on those engines remained almost unchanged since the previous year, having dropped from 28.3% in 2007 to 28.2% in 2008.

Such trends undermine merchants’ trust in pay-per-click business which can lead to significant losses incurred by prominent searching giants who make a substantial part of their revenue via their ads services. It most likely that web sites today are more interested in fast and idle earning on fake statistics instead of working hard to make efficient promotions and advertising that would persuade customers to make genuine clicks on the relevant links. Internet being a convenient place for conducting business across the globe is more and more getting a shelter for spongers.