The increasing popularity of the pay per click advertising model has led to a new challenge: click fraud. Click fraud is basically a way to make money by causing others to lose money. Click fraud, in essence, is any kind of fraud involving repeatedly clicking on advertising with a malicious intention. There are different types of click fraud, but this problem has driven up advertising costs and generally cost merchants hundreds, thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of dollars more than they should be paying in click costs.

One example of click fraud is a way to cheat the competition. In this scheme, a company or individual will pay groups of people, usually foreigners, to click on certain ads all day for a set amount of money. This drives up advertising costs for the company whose ad is being clicked, thus harming their bottom line. None of the parties who are committing the click fraud intend to buy the products sold on the website whose ad they are clicking.

Another example of click fraud is dummy sites created for the sole purpose of creating phony clicks. By creating a site that posts pay per click advertising from publishers like Googles AdWords, creators of these dummy sites hope to drive up profits by increasing the number of clicks that appear on their sites. One way to do this is to click these links themselves, though most publishers have provisions in place to hopefully eliminate this kind of fraud. Another way would be to pay someone else, preferably someone overseas, to do the clicking.