A Tale of Three Duplicities

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Last issue you may recall reading “A Tale of Two Duplicities.” Now you can enjoy the third and final saga in this trilogy of Internet shenanigans!

This had been a notable week in terms of the deluge of news articles regarding Internet fraud. Perhaps the summer heat and the forecast of temperatures rising into the 100s have an overall noxious effect on people’s behavior, compelling them to acquire the demeanor of cyber-villains in the same way that a full moon has been known to induce aggressiveness. Whatever the case may be, here is a recap that pushes the limits of the imagination:

I. The Trojan Horse and The MySpace.com Space Out

Remarkably, an online advertiser managed to insert the coding of a Trojan horse program into a banner advertisement running on the MySpace.com network. Visitors using older versions of Internet Explorer may have been infected. In effect, the way older versions of this browser process Windows Metafile images would have left them vulnerable to both hackers and adware programs alike. All of the estimates I’ve read indicated that the number may have been over one million MySpace.com users.

The Trojan horse coding itself does not distribute the unwanted pop up ads that plague infected computers. Rather, a Trojan horse covertly installs itself onto the user’s computers opening a line of communication with an outside server that downloads adware programs and other malware onto the users’ hard drives. I wonder why online advertisers are willing to subject themselves to lawsuits and criminal prosecution by choosing a ride on the Trojan horse?

What you can do to avoid this from happening to you: A tech-savvy friend once told me to download Mozilla Firefox as a way to avoid having my computer infected by simply visiting a page with a Trojan type program on it. Internet Explorer has also developed a patch that resolves this vulnerability to Windows Metafile images for aficionados who are loyal to this browser. If you’re a content publisher looking to earn revenue by displaying banner ads on your site, you should set in place a system of monitoring banner ads that you receive from your individual advertisers. Content publishers using third party advertising networks to distribute banners on websites, should make sure their networks have taken appropriate measures to screen the banners before distribution.

II. Click Fraud Practitioners Beware!

Google is becoming even more proactive. Guys: do you remember your high school quarterback who was good looking, got into an Ivy League on a full scholarship, and yet still managed to be humble about it? Didn’t it annoy you! That must be how Google makes the competition feel. Last week, an Information Systems Professor at NYU by the name of Dr. Alexander Tuzhilin indicated that Google is and has been taking appropriate measures to handle the problem of click fraud for the benefit of their advertisers. According to Tuzhilin, Google’s team of Click Quality inspectors systematically covers all four corners of “pre-filtering, online filtering, automated offline detection, and manual offline detection” while screening for invalid clicks.

Furthermore, a New York Times article indicates that Google plans on telling advertisers how many clicks are fraudulent. This transparency would be most reassuring, but for me this comes as no surprise. I remember receiving notice from Google that I had received a reimbursement in my Adwords account without me even having to ask for it. In my opinion, Google has already been on the ball in detecting click fraud for quite some time. Communicating this news to the public is done in order to reassure the nervous nellies of our space.

What you can do to avoid this from happening to you: If you’re a paid search advertiser, certain tracking and analytics software packages offer fraud detection tools. Keyword MAX for example offers a device called Click Auditor that appears on your screen as a gauge that looks like a speedometer, only instead of indicating speed, it detects the degree of fraud in your various paid search accounts. Paid search providers can detect an invalid click if it comes through a proxy server, through which a robot can send a request from more than one IP address.

Click fraud unfortunately happens, but with the proper tools, training, experience, and gut feeling, you can reduce the threat that it poses to you.

III. And the winner this week is… The Return of MixItForMe.com

For those of you unfamiliar with the story, allow me to regale you with a tale of adventure and woe that begins (or rather continues) in Providence Rhode Island. About a year ago, a company called MixItForMe.com scammed both small time individual shoppers and large online resellers out of several millions of dollars. Taking on the façade of a legitimate company for over six months, MixItForMe.com offered deals that seemed too good to be true, and that’s just what they were. Trendy electronic devices, such as razor phones, were sold through their website at a discount that could make New Yorkers smile in reminiscence of the frantic Crazy Eddy commercials we used to see on TV. The only thing unusual was a slight problem in fulfilling orders, a slight problem totaling several millions of dollars.

The venture ended in fiasco, when the FBI raided the Providence office, but not before the founder could escape and continue a life on the lam. He was recently discovered running a similar operation, this time in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It turns out his lifestyle could easily be placed in the context of a Sherlock Holmes novel or on the movie set of Catch Me If You Can, as he has been defrauding some pretty sharp people while under pseudonyms and living in an opulence that would make even the Count of Monte Cristo feel ashamedly poor. It’s believed he still continues to evade unsmiling authorities who fail to see the humor in his shenanigans.

What you can do to prevent this from happening to you: When making an online purchase, it’s a good idea to check out what people are saying about the company in online forums, especially if you’re thinking about shelling out some serious coinage. For example, a poster on www.resellerratings.com  vented “DO NOT BUY FROM THEM! This business is a scam–they charge you on the day you order, but youll never get it,” on March 12th 2005. A steady flow of complaints regarding non-deliverability and unwillingness to grant refunds occupied this same forum for since December of 2005.

Usually, such forum threads will turn up on a search engine when looking for the company name. If you have doubts, don’t simply go by what’s written on the company website even if chances are it is true: MixItForMe.com was after all approved by the Better Business Bureau of Rhode Island, which did eventually revoke its membership. However this was only done on April 17th 2006, well after FBI agents raided the headquarters under the authorization of a federal search warrant on March 27th. Word of mouth may simply be one or two disgruntled customers blowing off some steam, but if a torrent of complaints appears about a recently-founded company on forums, it should raise some red flags.