Los Angeles based law firm Kabateck Brown Kellner, LLP has filed a class action lawsuit against Citysearch, accusing it of promoting click fraud. The suit was filed on behalf of plaintiff Tom Lambotte, who has charged that Citysearch has failed to recognize or reimburse him for the clickfraud that took place on an ad he placed between December 11 and 31, 2007. The suit also applies to anyone who has used the click-based Citysearch ad program.
The lawsuit says that Citysearch promotes click fraud by paying its salespeople a commission based on the number of clicks their customers’ ads generate. It also states the Citysearch fails to take any steps to prevent click fraud, and does nothing to help victims.
The plaintiff’s claim is as follows:
“Lambotte’s Citysearch ad received a total of 7 clicks (plus two more that he generated) between December 11 and 25, 2007. On December 26 he received a response from Citysearch to his December 22 request to cancel his ad. Suddenly, his ad began receiving 12 to 16 clicks a day, for a total of 69 clicks between December 26 and December 31, when his ad was finally canceled. He received in these five days 10 times as many clicks as he had received in the previous two weeks. Despite this, Citysearch refused his repeated requests to reverse these charges.”
Basically there was an increase from less than one click per day to around 10 per day. The increase is significant percentage-wise, but the click rate was very low to begin with – any increase would represent a huge gain. On the other hand, if the plaintiff can identify a trend of neglect in Citysearch’s actions, then the class action suit could have some merit.
Kabateck Brown Kellner recently won multi-million dollar settlements involving advertisements on Google and Yahoo, and has recently filed a class-action lawsuit against Google’s AdWords program. With that kind of history it’s clear that the firm knows what it’s doing, but the case might be perceived as just another cash grab.
Any idea how much the guy is asking for in compensation?
yellowpages.com is NEXT
Click fraud is seen in all places. Google has a pretty darn good algorithm for their AdWords – definitely prevents duplicate clicks to a certain extent but cannot protect against proxies as well yet. PG and other CPC companies can’t control it much, only detecting duplicates within a short time-span. It’s hard to really prevent fraud. It’s probably as hard as preventing people from making fake dollar bills.
@Chhai: At 69 clicks and I guesstimated CPC of $3, that’s $207. At $5 CPC, it’s $345. At $1 CPC it’s just $69. Point being, it’s not a lot of money.
cityseach place on west hollywood ,ah ..
@Tim: its even much, much less than that…we’re talking .15 a click etc.
@Albert: google’s click fraud is *highly* overrated. I’ve personally seen them let 20%+ thru with semi-sophisticated bots…that shouldn’t happen.
it simply comes with the territory – no one should necessarily sue no one.
That’s like suing the police for ‘allowing’ crimes to happen.
How about a link to the complaint?
@Tim being that little, I thought he might try to claim for other “emotional” damages.
I don’t get it. The suit has to be tiny… we’re talking clicks here.
But then how’s he afford the attorneys’ fees? Is he bringing suit as a matter of priniple, or are the so-called “emotional” damages so astronomical they justify the expense?
having a bit of knowledge of these situations…and just to add a perspective here, its often difficult for content publishers to accurately assess the source of clicks despite even the most advanced technologies. citysearch could very easily have diligently investigated the situation and found no conclusive evidence of clickfraud, thus refusing to reward the advertiser’s claims
We’re talking about 7 clicks, totally ridiculous. I could click on my own ads 70 times per day without any significant or noticeable effect.
This is ridiculous, I`d hardly call this a “fraud”.
Desperate attorney. The kind that give the industry a bad name.
(allegedly) don’t sue me bro!
Can you imagine their first meeting?
“You’ve been harmed”
LMAO
I got warned for clicking on ads on my site, but I was genuinely interested in the companies that were advertising. I guess there is 2 components to click advertising – sales and visual advertising.
click fraud is a big problem, I have sent google logs showing them multiple clicks coming from a single ip within seconfs and gotten refunds in the past.
I think a competitor was trying to screw one of my clients
I had bitter experience with Yahoo advertisement, when my 50 bucks mysteriously dissappeared without ANY clicks at all. Hope that lawsuit teaches all fraud clicker a lesson.
So it’s a lawsuit from a person who didn’t get reimbursed for the equivalent of what I spend on groceries for a couple days or less?
Somebody remind him that not all business investments pan out. Just stop using the service, call it a day, and go somewhere else. Even if this lawsuit goes through, it’s just adding in rules which an unscrupulous company wouldn’t follow anyways, let alone that it could have some ripple effects for other advertisers who may have to increase costs for compliance.
This won’t stop click fraud.
Well obviously he doesn’t have a lot of clicks in this particular case, but it’s a class action lawsuit, so they must be filing for a large sum of money, to be distributed among a number of people advertising on Citysearch.
I don’t know a whole lot about the law, but that’s the basic principle, right?
That’s where the damages might end up, but class action tends to affect more than one company.
At least Google has done something to discourage click fraud, within current range of technology. As long as Google has lower click fraud rate, then those lazy ones which won’t invest on average mechanism of anti-fraud will be sued.
G has done about as much as they can, but I will not be surprised if these kinds of lawsuits starting making the rounds.
Citysearch actively enforces a strict click fraud policy, with advanced processes and technology in place to identify invalid click activity affecting our customers’ advertising. We continually monitor and analyze click activity to ensure that our customers’ advertising dollars are well spent on the generation of high-quality leads. The lawsuit filed against Citysearch has no merit, and we will defend against it vigorously.
I’m a tech who helped small company to get a web presence.
I joined citysearch on May 5th.
I got an average 4-5 clicks a day but all of the sudden I got 50-70 clicks for four days. All of the budget (i set to $200, luckily) was gone.
Several calls and emails to citysearch requesting details about the clicks but citysearch can’t offer me details, such as IP address, http referrals or such.
How can I tell, as a customer who should have the right to know what I pay for,
1) repeating clicks from same IP
2) how local are the ppl who clicks (supposed to be local advertising service)
By the way, according to their terms online (available @ myaccount.citysearch.com), in order to cancel the service, i can email to an address. however, that email address is undeliverable.
Another thing is that I can get a month to month contract if I sign up online. The sales person deceived me into a minimum 3 months contract. I’m glad I pick the minimum budget to start with, which is $200 each month.
One more thing is that there should be a $30 discount if sign up online. The sale person agreed to the $30 discount and it is in the recording. The email from that sale person confirms that too. Now the account manager says the discount / credit will be applied to the account in the second month, instead the first month bill.
I’m glad I have tuned up my customer’s web site good enough to show on the first page @ google when search for certain keywords. I guess I don’t really need to waste that ~$210 / month to citysearch anymore.
Still waste me ~$630 to get out of the contract.
I too was burned, this is probably a class action,
I’m sure that once this firm wins class action status, citysearch will have to provide the books on all their affected advertising customers that were victimized. My Account Manager even told me of how they would allow their ’sales coordinators’ to manipulate their version of the google content network, that they call matchcraft to simply best utilize the advertisers spending cap or budget to maximize clicks even if that click has zero relevance to the product service you are selling. I got burned to the tune of about 15k over the course of 4 months. My Account Manager there was fired and he even talked to me and told me how i was being defrauded. I had to contact American Express Services and request that they charge it back. Luckily it was. Moral of the story is- Advertising without efficient tracking/metrics is throwing your money away! As to this case, they can afford big attorneys so my guess is they would rather fight then settle. Good luck on b
The should sue Yelp. You get a bad review then Yelp contacts you and asks you for 250.00. They say “look at your reviews, you can move ones you like to the top.” You turn them down and the bad review goes straight to the top. The Yelpers were employees, I know I did work for Yelp then they reviewed me, the employees themselves. They can destroy a Mom n Pop and they are.
these crooks took me and my better half for over $1600.00 within a 3 month period. would not shut off our service and dodged our phone calls. not only out of the 1900+ registered clicks did we receive only 2 phone calls, but they set up multiple accounts under our name under unrelated sections to rack up even more clicks. we were in the start up phase for our business and because of this we lost everything. we are currently part of the lawsuit. these people are a bunch of heartless crooks. and I mean all of them. it was more than apparent after every heated phone call that they knew exactly what they were doing. they should move headquarters over to nigeria… were going to squash these thief’s where they stand.
I was also misled by Citysearch. They charged me over $1000 in just a few short months, burning through my entire start-up advertising fund, leaving me with no money to advertise with legitimate companies, not to mention all of the lost revenue in the process. I am now being forced to leave my office and start over in a new one.
In addition, once I canceled my account in July, they illegally re-opened in a month later and began charging me again. I didn’t find out about this until I went to get new tires for my car and my debit card was declined.
I called my roommate, and asked him to look at my account and tell me what had happened because as far as I knew, there was plenty of money in my account to cover that $185 purchase. He said that there was a hold placed on my account from Citysearch in the amount of $264.65.
At this time it was about 6pm EST and I tried to call Citysearch to resolve this matter. I was transferred over and over, placed on hold, hung up on while on hold, sent to the wrong departments and so on. I called on both my personal and business cell phone for an hour and was given the run-around by everyone that I spoke with until, conveniently, they were closed at 7pm EST.
I called the bank to dispute the charges and there was nothing they could do until the transaction had gone through because at that time it was just a hold placed on the account. I was stuck at the tire place, embarrassed, with no way to pay for my new tires even though I had, until Citysearch illegally withdrew the money from my account, the funds to cover that important purchase.
The next day, August 26, 2008, I called again and spoke with a man named Ray. As you can imagine, I was understandably not the most pleasant person and will freely admit that. I wanted to have my money back. He asked me to forward the email that I had sent to Michael Goggins (the rep in charge of my account) on July 21st to him, which I did. At that time he offered as a “courtesy” to refund me only $200 of the $264.65 that was withdrawn stating that I would only be refunded the amount from July 21 (the date of the email sent to cancel the account). This was unacceptable after everything that I had already gone through, and the fact that I was told by a representative of Citysearch that I would no longer be charged, so I asked to speak with a supervisor.
I spoke with Joyce Marshal and she stated that she would listen to the phone conversation from July 24, 2008 (when I finally called to cancel because Michael Goggins wouldn’t return my calls and emails) and get back to me between 3:00pm and 4:30pm on August 26. I informed her that after 4:30pm I would be in session with clients and would not be available. She did not call me back until 6:05pm at which time, as I had previously stated, I would was not available.
The next day, after my first client, I again called Joyce Marshal and was again only offered a refund for the amount after July 21, 2008. She stated that she listened to the phone conversation and that the man I spoke with on the 24th did not say that I would not be charged. This is wrong. I know what I heard, and I specifically asked him if I was to expect any more charges because I need to be able to keep up on the money coming in and out of my business. I am not a stupid person, and I make my living as a hypnotherapist listening to people and taking down every detail. I know what I heard.
After this I began writing letters to every email address for Citysearch employees that I could find, including the president. I was contacted by Scott Asher and told that I would receive a refund. That day, instead of receiving a refund, I got another charge for $6.90 adding to more overdraft fees.
He also stated that he would refund the overdraft fees but when I emailed him a copy of my bank statement with all of the charges, he said that they wouldn’t email it until I signed a settlement agreement with them, which I am not willing to do.
My car insurance was canceled because of all the overdraft fees, my business cell phone shut off and numerous other expenses that would take forever to list.
Citysearch destroys small business and the lives of the owners. This isn’t about making a buck for me, this is about right and wrong. I wonder how many other businesses had to close their doors after being scammed by these crooks.
Citysearch destroys small business and the lives of the owners. This isn’t about making a buck for me, this is about right and wrong. I wonder how many other businesses had to close their doors after being scammed by these crooks.
I agree they are destroying mine, my wonderful animal care facilities because they incourage competitors to post negative reviews. Then once anyone of your 23 employees when fired can make up even more lies when they know your only weakness is this site.
Folks. Here’s how CitySearch rips you off….
Let’s say you own a dress shop in Chicago and you only serve the Chicago market. You contact CitySearch and setup a listing/profile page for your shop to be listed on CitySearch’s “Chicago” directory because that’s the market you serve. You give them a budget and guess what, you quickly receive enough visitors to your profile page to max out your monthly budget! It doesn’t seem to matter how high or low your budget, somehow you get enough clicks to max it out. How can this be? Gee golly how can your little dress business get so many hits? Especially when you don’t see an increase in business on your end. No phone calls, no emails, no big jump in visitors to your own web site, virtually nothing.
The answer?…. drum roll please …
When you sign up for a listing for your “Chicago” business to be posted on their “Chicago” focused pages, you think that’s all you get, right? Heck no. It turns out they also bury on their site dozens of additional links for your business. They post these buried links on pages that are devoted to other cities/markets. So, they list you in Chicago as expected. But they also place listings/links for your business on their pages for Atlanta, and Los Angeles, and Houston, and New York, and San Diego, and St. Louis, and so on. Each of these additional listings or links automatically “redirect” to your “Chicago” profile page when they are visited or “clicked” … once clicked, presto! You are charged for the visit to your profile page. Remberber, CitySearch charges you when someone (or something) lands on your profile page, not on your own web site.
Now, these links are quite buried so no actual person will find them in a normal search. So who finds them? Search engine spiders do.
There are thousands of them out there that race around the web day and night. They follow every link they can find no matter how buried the link may be. These automated spiders are used by firms like Google, or Yahoo, or lesser known search engines to catalogue the entire web. Anyway, when you have dozens of links plastered all over CitySearch’s site you’re gonna get “hit” by these spiders and then get charged by CitySearch.
How can you verify what I’m saying? How can you tell if CitySearch has listed your firm on dozens of pages that have nothing to do with your geographic market? Simple. Do a Google search that contains two terms. 1) Your company name (it helps if your company name is fairly unique) and 2) the word CitySearch. What you’ll find are links to your paid listing in the city you chose, but also dozens of other listings in random cities around the country. Google may determine many of these listings are very similar and post the following text at the bottom of their search results list: “In order to show you the most relevant results, we (Google) have omitted some entries very similar to the (#) already displayed. If you like, you can (link starts here) repeat the search with the omitted results included.” Press that link and you’ll see all the additional links CitySearch has posted. Links that you did not request and that do not apply to your business’ geographic territory (assuming you are a small or mid-sized company with a regional focus). Press any of those additional CitySearch links, say the Atlanta link, and it will automatically forward to your Chicago profile page. Congratulations, you just charged youself for a visit!
In addition to the links on dozens of CitySearch City pages that are unrelated to your business market/geography, they give your info to “partners” who post links to your profile page on their web sites. Some of these will not be geography specific either. But CitySearch doesn’t care. What they want are as many links to your profile page as possible. More links means more clicks (even clicks by spiders). More clicks means they make more money. Simple as that.
Anyway, there’s a good reason why they create “profile” pages for you and charge you when the “profile” page is selected. I mean, wouldn’t it be better if they sent people directly to your website instead? After all, you’ve likely invested a lot of time and money on your site to communicate your brand, what you sell, etc. Do you really need a profile page with your address and contact info? That’s already on your own site! What gives here?
The reason they and others like Yellowpages use “profile pages” is so you cannot see and monitor in detail the click activity for that profile page. They control the page, they control the server, they control the data. All you get from them are crude visitor reports. If they charged you when people clicked directly to your actual web site then you would be able to monitor the activity in great detail. How so? Well, if you have a decent web analytics program you could see what time of day the clicks occur on your site. If a lot of the clicks occur between midnight and 5 a.m. there’s a huge chance the clicks are not human, rather they are spider activated. Or worse they are activated by humans who are overseas and paid pennies to click on sites like yours to raise the click count. Here’s another thing you can check with a good analytic program …. How long are the visitors on your site? If a lot of the visits are less than 1 second then you know the visit was by a spider. They come and go within milliseconds and show up on most analytic programs as a 0 second or 1 second visit. Again, you can only monitor this sort of stuff on your own site with a tool like Google Analytics (a free program). But since you are charged for clicks on your CitySearch profile page, you are at their mercy when it comes to reporting. And all they share with you are raw visits or something like that. And as I’ve discussed you have no way of knowing who or what caused those visits, when they occured, and so on. I have talked with CitySearch’s click fraud team (the foxes that guard the hen house) in the past and demanded more detailed reports. I was promised them but was also told that they would take weeks to produce. Did they ever send them? No. They never called back. They never sent the reports. I can’t say I was surprised.
In closing, I see someone has initiated a class-action lawsuit against CitySearch. I wish them luck.
by ocfondue October 1, 2008 2:14 PM PDT
I canceled my three accounts with citysearch in March of this year when my account exec at the time was trying to salvage the relationship. I asked why I was zipping through an $800 budget that is supposed to last for ONE MONTH in 12 days, he had no answer for me. He then brought me print outs of their click policies and asked me to keep it confidential that I read this information. The paperwork is called their “cheat sheet” basically showing you how they cheat advertisers out of their money!
Some of their bogus policies are:
-Per unique IP address they will charge you THREE times (at .40cents per click) per session. If that person gets off that web browser and jumps one a new one, it charges you again.
-Google maps- someone clicks on your map on google that is attached to citysearch, they charge your account
-Reviews, addresses, phone numbers, click over to YOUR OWN website.
It’s unbelievable. Also two of my locations were not authorized for SEM campaigns. When I signed up my third store, they placed this info on all three of my accounts. I started going through $800-1000 in 10-12days instead of a month-long campaign.
The regional manager for my acct. exec finally called me AFTER I canceled when I had requested to speak with him several times before I finally said goodbye to citysearch. I mentioned the clicks and the information I knew… my old acct. rep did last another three days apparently because of the convo I had with the boss. Fired for being honest to me about how the clicks work. LOVE IT.
I ended up doing a charge back on all three locations because they would not return my phone calls or email in regards to confirmation of the accts being canceled.
I purchased some tracking addresses to see how many clicks from citysearch were going to my webpages when the numbers got really suspicious and no one would contact me. I also put my traceable phone lines on the profile, NOT A SINGLE ONE. They all redirected to the main website and off to other locations of my business.
Citysearch is the biggest rip off, I hope someone takes them down. If I can jump on the Citysearch Lawsuit bandwagon sign us up. They owe me at least a couple grand in SEM clicks.
It also happens to be the most ghetto company in Atlanta to work for..They are quite pitiful..Im glad I left before that Titanic sanked…
I heard they have let a lot of people go and some just up and quit…
Happy to be a non citysearcher
Hey, i just signed up a few days ago, and i regret it. They only convinced me because i was interested in putting up my business, and they called me while i was in the middle of something, so i just got it over with and did it. I want to cancel asap. Today i received my first e-mail from them with my account information. So far we are in the creation stages. I hope i can still cancel even tho, i agreed to the 6 month contract over the phone. If anyone has any advise, please let me know, thanks.
I am in shock and disbelief at the moment. I do not know what to do!. I only signed up a few days ago, and citsearch has already been mysteriously charging my credit card. I want to cancel so badly, but i dont know how. I have yet to receive clicks or receive any of their services. Only thing they have done for me is a listing with no information in it. We are still in the creation process. They are already ripping me off and apart. I can afford these charges now, and cant for 6 months, this is impossible!!!! look at these charges i got from my online statement.
Pending ODP\SWP DR MEMO $9.68
Pending ODP\SWP DR MEMO $8.95
Pending ODP\SWP DR MEMO $7.25
Pending ODP\SWP DR MEMO $9.70
Pending ODP\SWP DR MEMO $205.54
Pending ODP\SWP DR MEMO $6.99
Pending ODP\SWP DR MEMO $21.99
Pending ODP\SWP DR MEMO $7.25
Pending POS DEBIT TMO*CITYSEARCH 800-611-4827 CA $359.95
Citysearch offered us #1 placement for our business but failed to change our listing at all. $200 a month for zero clicks, and both their sales rep and customer service refuse to return my emails or calls. I’ve changed my credit card number so I can no longer be charged by these scam artists. I also had our case featured on the Bad Company blog – http://badcompa...y.wordpress.com. It’s really frustrating dealing with these guys so I suspect I’ll never get my money back.
I had an account with Citysearch but after 200 clicks and not a single phone call I cancelled the account via Email an April 9. On May 30th $409 was debited from my account. I spoke to our rep and said he would investigate it. A week later he is still investigating. Today June 18 another $333 was debited from my account. I closed my debit card from Citibank and they are investigating and will try and get my money back. If not it is off to Small Claims Court.
Hey TC, any update on the lawsuit status?