One of our eCommerce sites here in the US where we advertise world wide was open to accept check and money orders as a method of payment. We had the conversion code posted to the appropriate page and legitimate orders seemed to come across fine and we were happy. This morning we came in, noticed we had 4 orders that were very large dollar amounts. All the transactions were going to a foreign country and all had the check money order payment method. Now we know these are not legitimate orders for the following reasons:
1.We know this is the same person because they are actually stupid enough to use a variation of the same name when they created accounts on our site, but different address each time and different accounts with different email addresses.
2.We know these are not legitimate sales because they are for electrical products that will not work in the country they are shipping to.
3.We know they are not legitimate because who in the world places $20,000 USD on an eCommerce site in the US and does not call for bulk pricing, shipping information etc….
4.We also know that the phone numbers in the accounts that were created on our website were not legitimate as well because we tried calling them and none of them work.
5.Bottom line, we will never see the sale or the payment.
Now, we pay some larger $$ for conversions so we immediately opened up our AdWords accounts and saw that we were getting charged for conversions for the sales. To prevent further fraud like this, we turned off the check and money order payment method immediately. Since that period of time, we have had that same person attempt to create 5 more accounts from different IP addresses but fortunately we turned that payment method off to prevent further issues and they have finally gave up.
We also reported this right away to Google AdWords and they were very responsive and pointed us in the right direction to fill out a report to open an investigation which can be found here:
[adwords.google.com...]
AWA, I know you will read this post and I just wanted to say that we chatted live with an AdWords specialist with a screen name of Deepika who was extremely helpful and knowledgeable. Deepika deserves a pat on the back for being so helpful and pointing us in the right direction and giving us very clear instructions and told us how to be very detailed. I am very happy with the quality of Google’s AdWords employees and with Google being so helpful with the reporting process and explaining everything to us. It makes us very comfortable and we know Google will look into this issue. You made us so comfortable we still have our campaigns running but have just flipped off that method of payment (Check Money/Order) off and still have credit cards on.
This shows us as an advertiser that there is a potential for a new type of fraud for eCommerce sites that have a check money order payment or sites that have an email sign up or a lead program via Pay Per Action. I am sure this will start a very good conversation on Webmaster world and the purpose of this thread is to share information such as filling out a click fraud report, brainstorm some ideas to help Google in preventing fraud in the future and possibly sharing ideas that will help advertisers and Google in the future. Pay Per action is still in the Beta and threads like this with useful information and comments can help us all out in the future.
Just so I understand, beyond just being careless thieves (as they seemed to have made a few missteps) is there any strategic reason to use such high purchase amounts? Was the bounty dependent at all on the purchase price?
