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As far as click fraud is concerned, there is increasing evidence that new patterns are emerging. While Google has improved impression fraud detection - a practice consisting of generating bogus impressions to reduce ad relevancy of your competitors to drive them out of Google - the fraud has spread to Yahoo and MSN. And more sophisticated bogus impression schemes are taking place on Google. Political activists and disgruntled employees, a new type of fraudsters not motivated by money, click on expensive paid ads from companies that they hate. They know which keywords are expensive.

Traffic distribution partners willing to eliminate competing affiliates on a search engine network are rumored to have used click fraud warfare, or clickware. Other fraudsters, in an attempt to hide their activity, are generating bogus impressions, bogus clicks and also bogus conversions. To get undetected, they keep their CTR and conversion rates to more discrete - yet still too high - levels.

On the other side, many companies are changing their employee internet usage policy for increased security. This means that sometimes, a same company or government agency uses spoofed IP addresses or one IP and one same browser shared by 50,000 employees. This can cause fraud detection systems to fail and generate many false positives, thus inflating fraud numbers.

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