Yahoo! settles Click Fraud Lawsuit

 
Buying products from online auctions like eBay can get you a good price, but beware of the scammers! There are a number of creative scams that take advantage of the unwary auction buyer and/or seller:

Misrepresentation: One of the oldest tricks in business. Just what it sounds like. Or more accurately, the merchandise ISN'T what it sounds like. Value, authenticity or condition may be overstated, sometimes wildly.
Failure to ship merchandise: The merchant takes your money and runs, leaving you nothing but a lighter wallet for your troubles.
Failure to pay: Through the use of fake money orders, bounced checks, stolen credit cards, or a number of other techniques, the buyer gets the goods and leaves the merchant with nothing in return.
Shilling: Artificially inflating the price on an item by use of fake bids from phony user IDs or accomplices.
Bid Shielding: Using high bids from phony accounts to run up the price and scare off potential buyers, the actual bidder then retracts the higher bids, getting the item at a much lower price than he would have otherwise.
Piracy and counterfeiting: The sale of pirated music and software or counterfeit art, phony jewelry or gems, and forged collectibles.
Internet Fencing: Selling stolen goods through the auction.
Triangulation: The seller offers to send you the item (usually new, brand name goods) on approval. They then use stolen credit cards to order the item shipped to you. You pay for the goods (in cash) after receiving them, and get a visit shortly thereafter from the police. Credit card fraud and theft.
The "Buy and Switch": The buyer gets the merchandise and returns a similar item that has been damaged, or a fake, with the claim, "It isn't what I expected." The seller refunds their money, and is left with broken and unresellable product.
Fee stacking: Fees, usually "related" to shipping costs, are added to the cost after the sale has been made.
Shell Auctions: No merchandise exists. The sole purpose of the auction is to get money or credit card numbers from unwary buyers.
Phony accounts: Sellers set up multiple dummy accounts, so they can create a history of positive feedback for the seller, who then uses these positive referrals to gain the confidence of the unwary customer.
Using PayPal: Paypal's agreement removes many merchant and cardholder rights! see www.paypalsucks.org for more information.

Click fraud - or bogus clicks on search links or advertising - is generated either by infected computer programs or by hired operators, who are sometimes even outsourced to 'click-shops' in India, Russia or South Africa. The activity is funded by companies wanting to waste their rivals' online ad budgets. In some cases, website owners have been known to engage in click fraud to inflate their advertising revenue, as brand owners often pay them for each click on a search-engine link or banner ad.

The settlement, where Yahoo admits no wrongdoing affects all Yahoo advertisers as a class. The time period affected is for advertisers who purchased pay-per-click advertisements between 1/1/1998 and 7/31/2006, during which time they were operating as Yahoo.com, Overture.com, and before that, GoTo.com.

If you were an advertiser during that period, you should go to www.checkmatesettlement.com.  You need to fill out and mail in a form by certified mail in order to be included in the settlement.  The exact amount has yet to be set by the courts, and the lawyers are getting a hefty fee, but one can always hope that we advertisers will receive some percentage of the funds we have lost from click fraud to Yahoo over the years...

We reported our experiences with Yahoo on the WebProWorld forum, on April 10th.  A number of other websites were reporting the same problems, tons of clicks being charged, but no sales or results.  When clicks go up on ONE provider, but no sales result from that provider... something stinks.  Thanks to this class action lawsuit, even if the refunds are small, it will force Yahoo to start paying attention to the quality of what it delivers to it's advertisers.  

The Assertion of Right to Participate form is available for download at www.checkmatesettlement.com. The form must be printed out, filled out completely, and mailed via certified or registered mail to the Claims Administrator at Claims Administrator, PO Box 1340, Minneapolis, MN, 55440-1340, by November 20, 2006  They will send an email and mail a notice to the addresses they have on file, but many advertisers may have moved in the meantime.

One man thought that $99 was too much to pay for a Bluetooth headset, so he found his own unique solution:
 

ORDER FREE MERCHANT MATERIALS HERE!!!

Copyright (c) 2004 Advanced Merchant Solutions, Inc. All Rights Reserved

  See all of our newsletters in our newsletter archive!  Get tips and tricks, previews of new product announcements, tips to prevent fraud, Free stuff, and much, much more

Merchant Information is a newsletter that is available to all members of MerchantAnywhere.com and Advanced Merchant Solutions, Inc. This newsletter is provided as an informational tool designed to keep you up-to-date on the latest news and tools available for mobile commerce and merchant processing. As with all user information, we do not give or sell your personal information to any outside company for its use in marketing or solicitation. To unsubscribe from this newsletter, please reply with "REMOVE" in the subject line.  All of our merchant applicants should be receiving this email newsletter.  If you would like to subscribe, send an email with 'SUBSCRIBE' in the subject to: merchantapp@merchantanywhere.com.  If you are currently receiving the newsletter, and would like to be removed from the mailing list, send an email with the word 'REMOVE' in the subject to: inform@merchantanywhere.com . Once removed, we cannot reinstate that email address, you must re-subscribe with another.