click fraud

noun

: fraud committed by clicking through an advertisement on a website multiple times to spuriously increase the cost to the advertiser

Click fraud is where organisations or individuals take advantage of search engines' pay-per-click models—in which a company pays a fee if a consumer clicks through from the search engine to its website after entering search criteria—by continually clicking on an organisation's link.

—Travel Weekly

Examples of click fraud in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

Then Alexander played for the room a series of audio recordings of the three hackers explicitly discussing their new click fraud venture. —Andy Greenberg, WIRED, 14 Nov. 2023

What is click fraud? —Ralph Perrier, Forbes, 25 Oct. 2021

These techniques include click spamming, clickjacking, click fraud, click injection bad bots and more. —Jacob Loveless, Forbes, 27 June 2022

One common scheme is click fraud, whereby an affiliate drives fake clicks to their partner’s site, via human click farms or botnets, with the aim of inflating their commission. —Guy Tytunovich, Forbes, 24 June 2022

Drenik: How do brands increase ROI when ad blockers and click fraud are prevalent? —Gary Drenik, Forbes, 19 Oct. 2021

The clicks are used for click fraud — e.g. to earn CPC ad revenue under false pretenses. —Dr. Augustine Fou, Forbes, 20 Apr. 2021

Researchers have discovered two Google Play apps with more than 1.5 million downloads engaging in a new form of click fraud that drained batteries, slowed performance, and increased mobile data usage on infected phones. —Dan Goodin, Ars Technica, 29 Aug. 2019

The extensions found by ICEBRG were used in a click fraud scheme, but company researchers said the add-ons just as easily could have been used to do more nefarious things. —Dan Goodin, Ars Technica, 19 Jan. 2018

Word History

First Known Use

2001, in the meaning defined above