In a continuing effort to battle click fraud, Microsoft puts legal motions into place to stop “click laundering”. Microsoft said the most recent scheme could have defrauded advertisers of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The Plaintiff, Microsoft, “… seeks injunctive relief and damages to remedy Defendants’ fraudulent conduct in perpetrating a sophisticated click-laundering fraud scheme on the online advertising network operated by Microsoft and to protect the integrity of Microsoft’s advertising network against the fraudulent actions of Defendants.”

The Defendant is RedOrbit and several John Does. Eric Ralls, president of RedOrbit Inc. denies these accusations. In a statement made to SeattlePi.com, Ralls says “I did not engage in click fraud. That’s absurd. It’s professional suicide.”

According to the lawsuit, Microsoft defines click laundering as “… herding otherwise innocent individuals to websites where they can be tricked into triggering clicks on advertisements, and using scripts or other methods to alter the information sent, for example, to adCenter.”

In the cases of “Microsoft v. Eric Ralls” and “Microsoft v. John Does”, Microsoft said they noticed “dramatic and irregular growth in click traffic” on two sites within its adCenter network.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Legal: Clickfraud | Microsoft: Bing Ads | Search Headlines

About The Author: John Ellis is a frequent search industry speaker and blogger, although he has spent most of his career as an in-house Online Marketing Manager. Working from this perspective has provided John with an understanding of high demand and budget concerns as it relates to marketing. He can also be found at www.JohnWEllis.com and on Twitter @JohnWEllis See more articles by John Ellis

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