Too Many Banner Click Throughs

Banner Advertising

[Vermont]

Hi,

I have written a script that keeps track of ip addresses, user agent and refering URL when a banner on our website is clicked.

Recently we have had many hundreds of clicks on our banners from the this same source in rapid succession:

IP: 162.83.232.22

USER AGENT:
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Win32; WinHttp.WinHttpRequest.5)

REFERER:
blank - nothing listed. It should be something like "http://www.ourwebsite.com/about-us/" etc.

What is interesting is the refering page should be one of our web pages, not a blank.

Any ideas what is going on? Bad bot probably but for what purpose - and why no referer?

On a side note, when the banner is clicked it goes to a script that records this info and then redirects the website belonging to the banner.

[mincklerstraat]

Yeah, this sounds like a bad bot allright. Doesn't make much sense, though. It's the kind of typical thing a kinda dumb and greedy newbie webmaster would do to get more cash out of pay-per-click banners; maybe it's a competitor trying to get you a bad reputation for this practice. You might have to do some fancy scripting on that redirect page that keeps track of bad ip's so you don't do so many real click-thru's when it's a bogus agent like this one.