Vietnam an Emerging Market for Click Fraud July 23, 2009
Click fraud, an internet crime perpetrated by people, automated systems and programs clicking on links and ads to increase investor appeal and ad revenue, continues to be complicated to police, and a report released Thursday by Anchor Intelligence shows Vietnam as a hotbed for online scammer activity.
“Nearly half of all the advertising clicks coming from Vietnam are composed of fraudulent traffic aimed at inflating online publishers’ advertising revenue, according to an analysis of billions of clicks a month on its clients’ advertising networks,” Forbes reported.
Canada and the United States rank second and third, both with slightly more than 25 percent of clicks coming from illegitimate sources.
Vietnam’s economy has seen a swell of online business revenue over the past few years. Anchor Intelligence Vice President for Products, believes the growing online population combined with the lack of stringent security and monitoring make Vietnam an easy target for fraud cultivation.
"Vietnam has a lot of PCs and Internet service providers with outdated software and other vulnerabilities," Sims said, according to Forbes. "It’s likely that users running Windows 98 on their machine have been infected with malware so that while they might be sleeping, their machines are still engaging in click fraud."
For a small country, Vietnam ranks sixth on the list of countries by click volume, Tech Crunch reported, indicating the rise in Vietnamese online business is not adequate to account for its click activity.
Major companies such as Microsoft and Facebook have launched major lawsuits battling click fraud, and while the trend is still on an overall upward trajectory, reports for June indicated a small drop in the incidence of click fraud since May.
