Click fraud or click theft on pay per click services has been in existance for quite some time. It is an identified threat for online businesses specifically those involved in pay per click marketing. The emergence of issues surrounding click fraud is one thing that should not be overlooked. "There is a lot of click fraud on the Internet," commented Danay Escanaverino, the director of marketing at Global Resource Systems in Plantation, Fla., a pioneering firm in the Web marketing field.

According to the president of Optiem LLC,ФЕ..click fraud has gained a lot of notoriety in the last six months. People understand the motivations that might be leading to fraudulent clicks, or as we termed in our panel back in Chicago, the non-converting clicks..Ф He identified some reasons why other people such as webmasters, designers, ordinary users, rivals just to name a few. Among the intents are competition, financial gain, blackmail or revenge. Its basically a webchain of motives.

Some of the fraudulent clicks are perpetrated by competitors. An advertisement of Customer X in one search engine is on top of the list, called the Уhot spotФ. Rivals who also want to hit such position find ways to outrank or displace Customer X somewhere below. One potent way to dislocate Customer X is to stop using their keywords/phrases. Eventually, that can change the status of the search list.

Financial gain is another technique of click fraud. Perhaps the most terrible click fraud comes from Web sites that bill their advertisers for imaginary clicks, to boost their advertising return. Lack of online ethics on the part of search engines sometimes blinded online advertisers. But how is real click idetified from imaginary ones? " Karen Regan, a spokeswoman for Mazu Networks in Cambridge, Mass., mentioned, УThe threat of fraudulent clicks is dominating the consciousness of the online ad industry today. The obsession is to identify malicious versus legitimate traffic before it adversely affects the network,"

Another contributing factor to click fraud is revenge from competitors. Lori Weiman, directior at KeywordMax described the competitive advantage click fraud "flavour." We are not just talking about competitors clicking on your ad from curiosity nor a one-time click for information about your site, but rather about competitive click behavior that happens over a period of timeЧpurposely to get try and get you to stop bidding."