Use click bots and indian clickers to win out on bids

Do you think this is being done?

[blaze]

For a laugh I bidded for some high cost / competitive keywords and wasn't getting very good conversion (when I thought I should).

Do you think it is possible that there are competitive players in this space who are running click bots or are hiring 3rd party companies to click on competitor Ads?

This would in affect force bidders out - or they would lower their bids.

Personally, I must say that I see no solution to this problem. Frankly, I don't believe that Google could stop a bunch of a paid clickers. Get a bank of phones and dialup accounts with a proxy to india or where-ever and it could be done in such a way that it would be impossible to detect.

[MarkHutch]

It sure seems like a lot of time and money to just root out competitors. What you suggest would take a bunch of both... Time & money...

[Sowe]

Here's an interesting article about this:
India's secret army of online ad 'clickers'
[timesofindia.indiatimes.com...]

[europeforvisitors]

There's a thread on the AdSense forum about Indian clickers:

[webmasterworld.com...]

Key excerpts:

This has nothing to do with Adsense or google.
Its clickthru.net and other crappy sites.. Basically your paid to surf and stare at advertisements all day. What was that company that went under a few years ago... alladvantage or something?

Alladvantage, desktopdollars, ect...
This is exactly what this article is about.