TL;DR: Click farms are evolving into sophisticated threats for marketers, causing significant disruption in digital advertising by inflating impressions with no real value. This blog details what click farms are, how they operate, their legality, and their evolution to human fraud farms.
Main Points:
- Definition of click farms and their operations.
- Reasons behind the use of click farms: ad fraud revenue, competition, and hiding fraud.
- Mechanics of click farms, including use of residential proxies and device spoofing.
- Legal status of click farms and click fraud.
- Evolution of click farms and the ongoing challenge for digital platforms.
Click farms have long been a thorn in the side of performance marketers. But lately, what was once an annoyance is now becoming a significant threat to marketing campaigns.
As this deceptive practice continues to evolve into newer, more sophisticated operations, marketers need to know what they’re up against.
What is a Click Farm?
A click farm is a fraudulent operation that employs large groups of low-cost workers to manually click on paid online ads.
Like automated bots, human click farms cause significant disruption in the digital advertising ecosystem. These farms have individuals clicking on ads without any intention of making a purchase or engaging meaningfully. They simply visit sites, inflating impressions with no real value.
CNN recently reported on click farms in Vietnam, a hub for this type of fraud. These farms are akin to Silicon Valley startups where walls of phones are being used for false engagement. The report found that most “farmers” advertised their services online for less than one cent per click, view, or interaction.
Now, why would anyone use click farms? There are three main reasons, and they all come down to some type of gain.
- Ad Fraud Revenue: Ad fraud can be a lucrative business. Click farms can generate revenue for themselves by directing workers to interact with ads on websites built for advertising purposes.
- Competition: Fraudsters can hire click farms to drain their competitors’ ad budgets in order to give their ads or social posts a competitive edge.
- Hiding Fraud: Human fraud farms (more on those soon) are hard to detect since they use human behavior to bypass basic tools that prevent bots.
Click farms can be profitable to fraudsters, but they also come at a price to your business. Any metrics reported are inaccurate, and ad spend is wasted. Once these false impressions come to light, your brand’s reputation can — and will — be negatively affected.
How Do Click Farms Work?
Click farms work by hiring individuals, often from regions with low labor costs, to perform manual tasks such as clicking on paid ads, filling out online forms, or engaging with social media content.
These inflated impressions and false leads are just the start. They can also participate in credit card fraud and other nefarious activities that go beyond simple clicks.
Click farms are becoming savvier. They can take advantage of residential proxies, making it look like the actions are coming from a local system instead of overseas. They can also spoof their devices with different versions and browsers to make it extremely difficult to detect fraud.
These fraudsters are becoming increasingly good at avoiding standard bot detection services.
Are Click Farms Illegal?
To put it simply, no. Click farms are not illegal.
However, the resulting click fraud is often in violation of online platform rules and advertising laws. The legal framework for addressing ad fraud is still developing and struggling to keep pace with rapidly evolving fraud techniques. It’s widely accepted that click fraud is deceptive, but there are no firm laws against it.
The Evolution of Click Farms
Like weeds, click farms have become more resilient, spreading faster and developing deeper roots. They continue to choke out real impressions and are leaving the digital marketing landscape a mess.
Platforms like Meta (formerly known as Facebook) and Instagram, where this type of fraud runs rampant, are trying to keep up. Meta shares how it takes steps to detect and reduce the risk of abuse from invalid clicks to make sure advertisers aren’t paying for fraudulent clicks. Similarly, Instagram has made it easy to remove potential spam and bot followers from a follower list for more accurate engagement metrics.
While these are positive measures, they simply can’t keep pace with the evolution of human fraud farms. Businesses need more sophisticated systems to put a stop to this type of fraud.
The Next Phase: Human Fraud Farms
Human fraud farms create a significant and ongoing challenge for marketers to maintain the integrity of their campaigns and data. These types of farms are more sophisticated and damaging.
Human farms commonly tap into a residential proxy network. In addition to using human behavior to avoid detection from bot prevention tools, they can also make their activity look like it’s coming from a local system to go undetected.
Stopping human ad fraud is difficult, but not impossible. Where many businesses go wrong is that they focus on bot detection like CAPTCHAs and other solutions that aren’t savvy enough to stop human fraud. You need a solution that can keep pace with the ever-evolving fraud landscape, and that solution is Anura.
Anura analyzes hundreds of data points in real time to verify that website visitors are genuine humans, increasing the likelihood of converting them into actual customers and enhancing your marketing campaign performance and ROI.
Stop click fraud and protect your budget with Anura.
