'Click Fraud' Threatens Foundation of Web Ads Google Faces Another Lawsuit by Businesses Claiming Overcharges By Sara Kehaulani Goo Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, October 22, 2006; A01 From her home surrounded by cornfields in Dow City, Iowa, Jackie Park spends hours each day on her computer, earning half a penny every time she clicks on an Internet advertisement. By the end of the day, she usually tallies a few hundred clicks, yielding about $300 a year. It's not much, but it adds up for the 35-year-old mother of five who became disabled three years ago. "You don't make tons of money," Park said. "But once you start clicking and you get actual payments, it becomes an addiction." Park is one of thousands of people around the world who receive e-mailed lists of Web sites every day to click on for cash. Operators of these fast-growing "pay to read" networks and similar "pay to click" rings say they provide a genuine audience for advertisers, but Internet fraud experts disagree. They say the networks fuel click fraud, which means using bogus clicks to pump up revenue artificially for search engines and their affiliated Web sites. In the past year, industry analysts say, new forms of click fraud have emerged from the shadows of masked operations into plain view on the Internet. Dozens of Web sites offer to pay people to sit and click on ads, or to type certain words into search engines for hours at a time. Some sites have forums where people swap click-fraud tips. Advertisers, who often pay for online ads only when someone clicks on them, have been crying foul and complaining to federal regulators. They've also sued the Internet's largest ad networks, Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc., which earlier this year settled class-action lawsuits by advertisers. A new lawsuit was filed last month in Pennsylvania seeking class-action status against Google. The FBI, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service are investigating click fraud. Google and Yahoo, which together handle more than 70 percent of all Web searches in the United States, say they have click fraud under control through technology that identifies suspicious clicks. But industry analysts are skeptical. Search engines "have a problem that defies controls," said Chuck Richard, a media analyst with Outsell Inc. who has studied the issue. rest of article here : http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/21/AR2006102100936_pf.html
I think web hosts have a moral duty to stop hosting any sites that encourages click fraud or any kind of fraud.