Google to Settle Click Fraud Lawsuit

Up to $90 Million!

[Swebbie]

SAN DIEGO (Reuters) - Web search leader Google Inc. said on Wednesday it had agreed to pay up to $90 million to settle a class action lawsuit over advertising fraud by outside parties on its site, in a bid to put the controversy behind it.

The settlement stems from a lawsuit filed by Lane's Gifts earlier this year in an Arkansas state court and is designed to settle all outstanding claims against Google for fraud committed using its pay-per-click ad system back to 2002, it said

Google to Settle Click Fraud Lawsuit - More... [today.reuters.co.uk]

[edited by: mona at 12:58 pm (utc) on Mar. 9, 2006]
[edit reason] source [/edit]

[Wlauzon]

That means we will all get about $1.21 back, and the lawyers got $14 million.

[Eurydice]

I think the payout will be 1) credit and 2) based on the amt of adspend.

[Wlauzon]

Ok, then we will only get back 43 cents. The lawyers will still get 14 million.

[deep_alley]

The point is, what ARE they doing to COMBAT click fraud? I know its difficult to totally stop it, but google doesnt even clearly tell us what it is doing. Advertisers who dont know better or dont know how to deal with the issue just have to trust that google is not charging them for fraudulant clicks.

[Wlauzon]

Of COURSE they are not telling us what they are doing. If they did, then that would give information to the fraudsters, who would be that much quicker to find ways around it.

[jpchrysler]

It is a fine line between revealing enough information to make advertisers comfortable and not enough that publishers can abuse their methods.

That being said, most click-bots either hijack users computers to send clicks from their PC's while they're ignorantly typing away doing something else, or grab proxies and imitate human users by any number of different means (including viewing .js and such).

It's just not rocket science.