Not even a mouse | Sepia Mutiny

‘Twas the night before Christmas,
And all through the house
Not a creature was stirring
Not even a mouse…

All along, I thought desis were good at forming cliques. Actually, it turns out they’re good at click farming — hiring people to click ads on your own Web site to earn pay-per-click payments fraudulently.

The Jan. 2006 issue of Wired mentions this widely-disseminated ToI scare story from last year:

With her baby on her lap, Maya Sharma (name changed) gets down to work every evening from her eighth-floor flat at Vasant Vihar [in New Delhi]. Maya’s job is to click on online advertisements. She doesn’t care about the ads, but diligently keeps count — it’s $0.18 to $0.25 per click.

A growing number of housewives, college graduates, and even working professionals across metropolitan cities are rushing to click paid Internet ads to make $100 to $200 (up to Rs 9,000) per month… “It’s boring, but it is extra money for a couple of hours of clicking weblinks every day…” [Link]

p>Because search engines make their money whether the clicks are from legitimate customers or from scammers, they are only weakly incentivized to prevent the fraud. Those being ripped off: the small businesses who advertise.

Clicks are bought to boost number of hits for web ads or online advertisers who are not tracking user location. [Link]

Users are careful to avoid triggering anti-fraud algorithms by not clicking too often:

“I have no interest in what appears when clicking an ad. I care only whether to pause 60 seconds or 90 seconds, as money is credited if you stay online for a fixed time,” says another user. [Link]

Similarly, spammers are using image captcha farms in India — hiring people to enter the anti-spam picture codes which Web sites require to prove that you’re not a spammer.

Against this backdrop of outright theft, gold farming starts looking legitimate.

3 thoughts on “Not even a mouse”

Sonia on December 24, 2005 at 10:07 am said:

A friend of mine worked for a company in CA owned by an Indian that did the same thing. I’m so surprised they never got caught.
ngm on December 25, 2005 at 12:49 am said:

There’s some weird plagiarism going on here. An almost identical article from Asia Times says the following:

When her three-year-old son goes to sleep every night, Mallika Rao, a graduate in history, begins to work from her third-floor apartment in Gurgaon, a Delhi suburb. Mallika’s job is to click on online advertisements. She doesn’t care about the ads that in any case are targeted at United States/United Kingdom-based consumers, but diligently keeps count of them

A growing number of housewives, college graduates, and even working professionals across the country are in a rush to click paid Internet ads to earn anywhere between US$100 and $1,000 every month.
Tapan Bose on December 25, 2005 at 12:42 pm said:

Read (I think it was some recent issue of The Economist) something like this is going on in China where cheap labour is employed by the wealthy (from the west) to pay the willing Chinese to play computer games (on their behalf) so that the the payer(from the west)can come up to higher levels of the computer game and then play. Outsourcing of a kind !