Live from SES Chicago: Google Drops Click-Fraud Prosecution

The traditional panel discussion on the state of click fraud at this year’s Search Engine Strategies Chicago meeting took on added interest yesterday with the news that an alleged click fraudster who tried to extort payment from Google with the threat of a software “click bot” saw criminal charges against him quietly dropped last month.

A Business Week report on Monday revealed that in late November Google allowed the case against Michael Anthony Bradley, an Oak Park CA programmer, to be dropped by the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of California. Bradley had been arrested by the U.S. Secret Service in March 2004 after allegedly demanding $100,000 from Google to keep him from releasing “Google Clique”, a software program he claimed would allow other users to commit massive click fraud.

Bradley was arrested when he was persuaded to meet with Google officials to discuss the alleged extortion demand. Prosecutors reportedly even had a tape of his demands to Google executives, and Bradley’s claim on a Web site he operated that he had earned $30,000 per month by using the software to click on PPC ads on ten sites he owned within the Google AdSense publisher network. Bradley was indicted on extortion charges later in 2005.

The case was widely expected to produce the first criminal conviction relating to click fraud. Google has brought several civil lawsuits against alleged click fraudsters, winning one of its most notable suits against Texas-based Auction Experts in July 2005. And the company has loudly trumpeted its vigilance at catching bogus clicks before advertisers are charged for them, publicizing an independent study that found it was doing a “reasonably good” job of dealing with click fraud.

In that light, many observers have seen the quiet dismissal of the charges against Bradley as a sign of Google’s unwillingness to allow the specifics of its click-fraud tracking measures to make it into public court records.

But Shuman Ghosemajumder, Google’s business product manager, trust and safety, told an SES audience yesterday that the problem with the case related not to the weapon Bradley was brandishing—click-fraud software—but to the legal grounds of extortion.

“I’m told by our legal team that in order to prove extortion, you have to show that damages would occur [if a threat was carried out],” Ghosemajumder said. “Based on our analysis of [Bradley’s] click-fraud software, we found that we would have detected the clicks that it generated, so there would have been little or no damage from it.”

Ghosemajumder added that the decision to drop the Bradley prosecution was ultimately made by the U.S. attorney, not by Google. Asked whether Bradley could indeed have made money using his click-fraud software as his Web site claimed, Ghosemajumder reiterated that Google’s analysis determined that it would have detected the bot and disallowed any clicks it automated.

Other panelists were not so convinced that the case was dropped simply because Google is too good at detecting fraud. Some worried that Google’s failure to pursue Bradley would send the wrong message to other fraudsters.

“It’s possible Google wanted to avoid going forward with this case so no information would come out about their [fraud-detection] processes,” Lori Weiman, director of click auditing firm KeywordMax, told the audience. “That’s what I think people are gleaning from this Business Week article. I think there’s a real danger if fraudsters believe they can get away with this stuff and the engines aren’t going to take any action against them.”