When it comes to ad clicks, Anchor Intelligence says it has more data than anyone this side of Google and Yahoo. And so when they release a report for the first time outlining what they’re seeing in click fraud rates, it’s worth paying attention to. And the numbers are interesting.
This initial report spans the first 6 months of 2009. Clicks are broken down as “valid” or “invalid”, with “invalid” ones further broken down into “innocuous invalid” and “attempted click fraud”. That last classification is obviously the key one. Over those two quarters, Anchor Intelligence’s data indicates that click fraud has remained steady, increasing slightly in Q2 to 22.9%, up from 21.7% in Q1. Yes, it remains a problem.
But the real interesting data comes when you break down the click fraud rates by country, as the report does. While the U.S. is pretty bad with an attempted click fraud rate of just over 25%, that pales in comparison to Vietnam, which has an attempted click fraud rate approaching 50%. No other country is even close to them, as Canada is number 2 with a 27.7% attempted click fraud rate, and the U.S. is third.
And while the U.S. accounts for the majority of the clicks that Anchor Intelligence sees, it’s not like Vietnam is entirely insignificant on the list. Of the top 30 countries Anchor measures, Vietnam has the 6th most amount of click volume across the network.
Back in April, Anchor Intelligence announced that the search engine Ask became a client to try eliminate some of its click fraud. While the service is fairly secretive about who it works with, other Anchor clients include Technorati, LookSmart and Adbrite.
Find some of the key parts of the report below.
And this is why ecommerce sites won’t take orders from Vietnam. The amount of payment fraud coming out of that one little country is amazing.
Man (& MG Siegler), the really big jerks in regard to fraud work at Wallstreet and in London, not Nigeria, not Vietnam!
So, if you really want to do something for your country, make sure investment and private bankers can’t loot your country any longer. That’s a legal fraud in the trillions of US$ range, not an illegal one in the millions to billions range.
Once you fixed this, you can care about click fraud and Nigeria scams.
Some bankers on Wall Street don’t affect me. They really don’t. I don’t day trade, I don’t even hold most of my savings in cash (let alone US dollars). Dealing with chargebacks every single week from overseas fraudsters making purchases with stolen credit cards, threatening my ability to accept credit cards from legitimate customers, does.
So you don’t pay taxes? That’s a fraud, too.
If you pay taxes you should be very concerned about “some bankers” at Wall St.
Supposed you neither live in the States nor in any other country that’s affected by the U.S. sub prime mess (are there any? Perhaps Nigeria or Vietnam, I guess), you’re a lucky guy.
Dealing with chargebacks sucks, of course.
Here’s a piece on credit card fraud out of Vietnam.
“Vietnam is now our greatest source of fraud. The number of fraudulent orders arising out of Vietman is 10 times more than all other countries combined, including Nigeria. We get several orders every day and have decided to block all vietnamese ip addreses.
Some of the latest attempts have got pretty nasty. They would actually make an order using the genuine shipping address of the cardholder. I think this is done either to soften us up, or our of revenge for declined orders.”
I hate to say it, but it seems the Viemanese people are very creative in injecting fraud into anything and everything they do. They are in the fingernails business here in the States, and guess what, that industry is nothing but fraud. The Viemanese are also heavily concentrated in the mortgage lending industry and here too, they seem to find ways to profit not from hard work but from fraud.
lol, what’s up with Vietnam?
Congrats Vietnam. You officially becomes the leading click fraud in the word
)
OFFFFFFF!
Aminooo.com
The amount of click fraud indicates organized criminal efforts that are not significantly impeded by law enforcement.
The bigger issue is how law enforcement agencies can be supported and encouraged to reduce IT-enabled criminality.
The criminal gangs have the infrastructure. The good guys have their hands tied—by themselves in many cases.
Both the National Association of Attorneys General (NAAG) and the National Governors Association (NGA) have been largely missing in action regarding IT-enabled criminality. And the FBI? Resting.
Laws dating from the era of the Pony Express have proven unsuitable for modern ecommerce environments. The same situation exists in regard to stemming international telemarketing scams targeting Americans—especially seniors.
We can fix this.
well, how do you want to fix this?
By shutting down the Internet in order to prevent any kind of Nigeria scam or fraud to happen? You can’t get these guys unless you sacrifice some of today’s freedoms. And that’s probably not worth it.
Perhaps, the introduction of IPv6 would be a step forward. OTOH, many people dislike IPv6 due to its impact on privacy.
I wonder why I’ve never been victim of an e-scam? Must have something to do with my personality, I guess.
Dude,
wtf is your issue with Nigeria?
There are over 150mln ppl in that country and it is a great insult to impugn that many people over an article that DOES NOT cite Nigeria.
There are many well educated Nigerians in Stanford, Harvard, MIT, Oxford, Cambrige, NASA. Some even with Nobel prizes.
I’m sick and tired of this insult over the actions of a few Nigerians that really should know better.
Let’s face it Concerned Nigerian, we are known worldwide for fraud. You should not be angry at people who hold this perception. You should be angry with our countrymen for actively creating this perception in the first place. Reputation and perception is created by not by the perceiver but by those being perceived.
Everytime I go back to Lagos, I am disgusted at the site of internet cafes filled with young nigerian men doing nothing but one form of fraud or another.
I mean “sight.”
WORK E COMMERCE all of them is war
Please try to write something coherent once in a while.
Huh? What did Aminooo say?
It’s much easier to skew data when you have a limited data set contributing — i.e. small networks can likely generate click fraud and be detected more easily
$ grep GeoIPCountryWhois.csv | wc -l
106
$ grep “United States” GeoIPCountryWhois.csv | wc -l
13737
Expect to see greater refinement of bot networks selling passive or off hours batch processing of click fraud like services much in the same way cloud computing centers offer their services today.
edit:
$ grep Vietnam GeoIPCountryWhois.csv | wc -l
106
hehe I’m not clicking and also not making the clicks – I am innocent from the list =))
cai gi?
yeah buddy, … if you not doing anything bad, don’t put yourself down.
I was expecting Pakistan in the top 10 list. But it’s nice to know that we do have click fraud but we are not at least US
lol…this is cool.So more adsense bans coming up?
That is a sad news for all Vietnamese publishers but anyway it is the fact according to the figure here.
how about Indonesia?? and where i can find about above information??
rather than standing up tall vs. vietnam, the US should be worrying about why it’s standing below India/Egypt/Malaysia
This is not true.
Because Vietnam ISPs share public IPs among their subscribers, many ADSL subscribers use the same public IP.
If your website cannot detect it, then it’s your problem.
Compare this report to your 2/22/2007 article: http://cl.gs/2zdD7y
Vietnam was high then (but not as high as now), and Mexico seems to have gone way up since.
OTOH, that was a report by another company – Click Forensics (this one’s by Anchor Intelligence). It’s not surprising that they’re different – you’d get the same kind of discrepancies if you compare traffic reports from ComScore and NetRatings. The thing to remember is that it’s really not clear how they get these numbers, so use them (and report them…) with a grain of salt.
Just wondering if the US is not the worst, is that an excuse not to do anything about it?
I have a hard time believing that anyone clicks ads at all.
The authors of this “study” should have included a disclaimer: “truth be told, we simply don’t know”.
There is no way they have data which click is fraudulent and which is not.
When Google comes forward with their internal data on valid and invalid clicks, there is something to actually report.
Isn’t the high click fraud number from the US due in part to the fact that many offshoring companies come from US IPs despite being in India, or other countries?
What if they know in Vietnam some people call it “an industry” with thousands of “workers”. Sometime we are only workers, while the high boss, who profits the most from it, is American.
I dont know why talking about Vetnam because to my sources India is still one of the poorest country in the world the illiteracy rate is one BILLION people not know how to read and they say India also have the highest poverty rate about 40% of the Indian population make not more than one dolla per day and so if you thing about it and thing hard you will see India not worth it to invest into theyr’e infrastujure it not woth it because that’s guy he tell me nothing in the population to advertise to becaseu they dont have no money to buy what they see even though they only see what you avertise so they say thing about it it not what you know it who you know it not who you know it who know you.
Proofread! Proofread! And, every time I wonder why those guys take away all our jobs!
… Ok. First of all, I’m from Vietnam and I think think this report is NOT accurately measure the actual FAIR number. Here is my reason.
MOST OF VIETNAM INTERNET POPULATION USES INTERNET CAFE. My estimate 95% Vietnam internet users. (so it means that 1 computer @NetCafe could have used by dozen of people in 1 day.) They are not like here 1 user/1 computer.
AS YOU KNOW, ADVERTISING COMPANY TRACK CLICK AD BY IP, It won’t work when TRACKING CLICK AD IN VIETNAM.
Just give you an example:
.If I’m from Vietnam and I go to NetCafe to visit Yahoo. I clicked on some ads and Anchor Intelligence, track ads was click on me ip A.
Later, another user B, go to the same NetCafe’s computer, he visited Yahoo and click on some ads and it is happened to clicked on the ads I clicked.
Then, they reported it is not valid click. As you see, THE TRACKING VALID CLICK BY IP WON’T WORK SINCE THERE ARE TOO MANY USERS IN VIETNAM USING THE SAME COMPUTER.
… If advertising companies want to accurately do the report, they need to figure out the different way. Otherwise, article like this and all the retweet will damage the image of Vietnam.
For me, I don’t think it’s true so I speak up!!!!
I want to go to Vietnam to marry a beautiful, obedient wife. I never have any luck with the ladies here in America. Mr. Trung Ngo, can you help me find a nice Vietnamese girlfriend?
yeah … my suggestion, marry someone you respect and she’ll respect you. then who care where she from.
… i’m from Vietnam but I’m living in Houston.
But I think Duck’s logic is that he is more likely to find a woman who respects him if he looks in Vietnam. He gave up on finding a woman in “America.” In that sense, it does matter, and he should care, where she is from.
On a serious note, I have several Vietnamese friends and a common topic of conversation amongst them is going back to the motherland to find wives. There is a legitimate reason, as I understand, for doing this. That reason is because a substantial percentage of Vietnamese women in the US have been or shall be acquired by men of other races, such as White men.
yeah, … rule of thumb, respect yourself first then women will die to respect you. that’s my logic to conquer any kinds of women.
i’m living in Houston and it’s abundance over here. there is no reasons to go anywhere … what so ever!!!!!!!!!!!!
… Ladies in “America” … just as good as else where!!!!!!!!!
.i’m a Vietnamese too. … do i need any legitimate reason to NOT finding any women in “America”?
.ABSOLUTELY NOT!!!!
.just one word “CONFIDENCE” … is all it take 4 man!!!!!!!!!
- I agree with the fact about the frauds in credit card purchase in Vietnam. I know it from my brother who is in e-commerce business and he knows quite a few experience on handling this in Vietnam. However, you can reduce the fraud rate significantly with common sense, understanding of culture together with some simple sanity checks. So, people who want to do e-commerce in Vietnam don’t give up. It’s nearly an unoccupied land and there is a way to do it correctly if you interested in enough to learn.
- I agree with Trung Ngo. The way that people use Internet in Vietnam is very differently from the way people do in US. For example, most of the time, people use Internet in shared public PCs. The method to detect and classify click fraud of Anchor Intelligence may work well with the assumption in the context of US, but in Vietnam many assumptions may be violated.
- Finally, I think belittle a whole country by using a “catchy title” is not a very constructive and ethical way to buy public attention. Especially when doing that without being firmly backed by some convincingly proven finding.
I am Nigerian Prince and would be very interested in meeting a nice Vietnam lady. Vietnam is not known for ecommerce, rice, or war Vietnam is know for beautiful women with straight black hairs.
Here’s an interesting piece on ecommerce fraud out of Vietnam:
Vietnam is now our greatest source of fraud. The number of fraudulent orders arising out of Vietman is 10 times more than all other countries combined, including Nigeria. We get several orders every day and have decided to block all vietnamese ip addreses.
Some of the latest attempts have got pretty nasty. They would actually make an order using the genuine shipping address of the cardholder. I think this is done either to soften us up, or our of revenge for declined orders.
Vietnam has now entered the superleague for credit card fraud.
I when back to Viet Nam last year the women there treat me so well I thought it was really true that I was an attractive man because they were hugging and touching me and then I realized my wallet was missing after I left the Bia Om restaurant. A day later, before I even had a chance to cancel my Capital One card, there 9 charges totaling almost $16,000. I went back to the same Bia Om to inquire on my lost wallet and they almost beat me up. Yes, this country is full of fraud. However, I do consider it an insult that our residential troll, Mr. David Ood misspelled and mispronounced “Vietnamese.”
That’s why when I go again this Christmas, I wish some body would introduce me first to some girls so I don’t have to go to the wrong places like the Bia Om to meet women.
Hi Duc,
Very happy that you would like to get married with a vietnamese girls and i think you are right. But there are a lot of beautiful women out there either in Vietnam or in US, the importance is that you find the right one to live with who will take care of you and vice versa, not the one who would get married with you for money. My advice is that don’t get married with anyone who is so easy-going , esp. bar girl.
Back to your case in Bia Om restaurant, Bia Om in Vietnam can be interpreted as a bar girl, who can be sex workers, prostitutes or decent girls, but the name says it all, 99% of Bia Om girls are sex workers, so be careful. Their main job at this type restaurant is not to serve your food but to serve you sex and of course, with a stranger or a foreigner like you, they could take advantage to charge as much as possible or even stole your card and wallet, many times this happened, so be careful again.
Regarding the credit card fraud, yes, I have experienced with this issue and I got a confirmation fron One Theme asking me to pay 3,500USD for WP Themes with my card details but I had never ordered this, fortunately I had no money in card that time. So, I hope this will be improved soon to make e-commerce market place better and better.
It seems your name looks like Vietnamese name and I have several friends who are also Viet-Kieu got married with Vietnamese girls with a happy life and had several children, he is even a disabled man and now he is living in Hanoi and works here as IT Experts, if you would like to get married with Vietnamese girl, someone can introduce you maybe me, not sure
Good luck
Oh man,
You should have made inquiries or simply asked your friends before hand. Going to “Bia Om” in expectation of trustworthy company (especially female) is like hiring convicts as your bodyguards..
For people who doing business in Vietnam. There are a lot things different than here.
1. Vietnam is mostly carry cash any where they go to purchase. Shop, mall, street, .. and even business.
.. to purchase an airline ticket, it is cash.
.. there’s only 1 or 2 percent using credit card.
2. The online payment infrastructure of Vietnam is very very backward, even when I went back recently in 2005. there was company that offer online transaction. Even the biggest bank over there VietcomBank.
.. so selling online very much .. impossible.
and i agree, payment transaction is the biggest challenge.
.. cash is the only way right now!!!
(credit card’s not recommended due to fraud.)
.. however, there are a lot of IT outsourcing potential in Vietnam. it is growing fast!!!
.although it is a poor country, economy is the one of the fastest growing in the world.
IBM invest billion in Vietnam
http://www.atim...a/HK29Ae01.html
SAP make a good profit over there.
http://vietnamn...num=01BUS070309
if some companies want to invest in software outsourcing then Vietnam have some great potential.
follow me on twitter for more update about IT outsourcing in Vietnam.
http://twitter.com/vietnambiz
I dont know how Anchor Intelligence caught statistic. And what’s exactly “invalid click” mean. But im sure, these statistic is rubbish.
Many people here, known, went to, hear something about vietnam but see. Even, some people think that, till now, Vietnam have a lot of slum. They even think we have no rice to eat while we are the second in top rice export.
My point is, dont trust while hear someone about something.
I will ask professional about what’s exactly valid and invalid mean. Someone could please help me?
I also agree with @Huy and we need more evidence and methodolody that company used to generate this data, otherwise it is meaningless
I live in HCM city and run an internet business in Vietnam. Firstly, I question the methodology of the research to make claims about countries like Vietnam:
1) The research is talking about the source of clickfraud for US publishers, right. It’s not about click fraud in Vietnam on Vietnamese ad networks or publishers. (I know this because there’s not a single publisher/ad network here that would share that detail of data…yet)
Adbrite and the other networks have no significant scale here, so their sample size would be samll and horribly scewed to low-end publishers.
2) Could it be that US networks ‘outsource’ the click fraud production job to countries like Vietnam, China, Mexico. Much the same as spam email has long been outsourced to countries where the laws are less up to date for the digital world.
3) 99% of online advertising in Vietnam is based on fixed tenancy or cpm. There is almost no cpc/cpa market in Vietnam right now, so no-one would benefit locally from generating fraudulent clicks.
No one can deny Vietnam’s hand in e-commerce fraud – and perhaps, that extends to generating click fraud for overseas publishers?? And the sooner this is cleaned up the better for Vietnam. There are probably a very small number of people causing this trouble for everyone else.
To anyone that doesn’t know. There are 25m regular internet users in Vietnam. There are big, credible publishers and local online services covering all sectors. And a lot of purchasing power. To cut Vietnam off, is to overlook one of the fastest growing internet, mobile and consumer markets in the world.
nice to see someone like you doing business in Vietnam.
.. yeah, me too. i’m thinking about going back sometimes in the future.
.. yeap, base on many recent report, the software outsourcing is a very attractive.
i have many old friends working in Saigon, it is very cool if i could move back soon.
I live in Long Beach, close to Orange County, where there’s a huge population of Vietnamese living in Little Hochiminh City. It’s worse than Little Havana when I used to live in Miami. There’s so much fraud of all kinds going on here in Little HCM City that you have to watch your back with everything you do.
Hi all
We are selling CCV
Contact me via email : admin@vietmaker.com
We will help you become cheater and frauder
Viet Nam no 1
The theft of my Capital One card at the Bia Om restaurant probably eventually lead to the hands of people like Vietmaker– lead to their hands real fast– less than 24 hours.
Our people are not too good at management and business, but they are the best at cheating and stealing. This is so shameful.
Thank you for the advices about girls in Vietnam Mr. Tinh. I will be more careful and plan ahead the next time I go back.
There could be many reasons for this. For example forbes blames it to PC security (http://tinyurl.com/l8wage), or simple the shared ISP IP problem…
Stats are just for reference…
But what ever the reason is, it is a growing economy with a potential of almost 100 million users, and a promising business opportunity. Google adsense will make a way into the market, etc…
Please people…stop generalizing, stereotyping and demeaning the entire culture and people based on a unilateral and one dimensional data. As the the first and only Googler on the ground for Google in Vietnam, and I can tell you that click fraud behaviors are the same everywhere in the world (people here are no more fraudulent than anywhere else). I got ripped off more often in 10 yrs in the U.S compared to the 10 years I stayed in Vietnam.
If the data from Anchor Intelligence is correct it only reflect the methods that used…does not reflect criminality of the population as some people have suggested.
Many have correctly diagnosed that a large number of the 22 million internet users connect via cyber cafes and hot spots. Here are the facts: over 7000 cyber cafes and public hotspots in Saigon alone. You can find a cyber cafe than a taxi in this compact city. They are so popular that even Yahoo built 10 of them just to prove that they truly dig the culture.
Hope that helps..
… too sad for stereotype and too sad for honest Vietnamese try to do business.
.for article like this, probably reading by thousands of people here and thousand more will be distributed around the net.
.honestly, i don’t trust the data from Anchor Intelligence or at least the method they conduct the research.
.as a Vietnamese, i would request more intensive research before making any conclusion because this is a serious matter that affect thousands and millions of people and image of a whole country.
.would ask for more data from leading publishers like Google, Yahoo, and other big ads network and the way they do click tracking.
.with the catchy title like this one, Techcrunch’s people should have do more research. instead of just relying on Anchor Intelligence.
.what if Anchor Intelligence is wrong?
… about some American here who slashing on Vietnam, remember that we also on the top lists of countries … doing fraud clicking.
.we should also be in the lists of crucifying, not instead point out the gun at other. (thanks to TC)
.some people here is making wrong assumption 50% fraud click in Vietnam = 50% bad guys there.
.so according to the report 27% fraud click in the US, does that mean we have 27% cheaters or 67 millions American?
THIS IS ABSOLUTELY NOT … only a small percentage of those guys from Vietnam doing that that cause Vietnam to look bad.
… please think more fairly before passing judgment on other….!
… about some American here who slashing on Vietnam, remember that we also on the top lists of countries … doing fraud clicking.
.we should also be in the lists of crucifying, not instead point out the gun at other.
.some people here is making wrong assumption 50% fraud click in Vietnam = 50% bad guys there.
.so according to the report 27% fraud click in the US, does that mean we have 27% cheaters or 67 millions American?
THIS IS ABSOLUTELY NOT … only a small percentage of those guys from Vietnam doing that that cause Vietnam to look bad.
… please think more fairly before passing judgment on other….!
I think you guys are focus too much on technical issue instead of economical issue.
off how viet nam in top
XD
this report not real in when internet users use net CAFE. >> dont have time to CLICK ADs unless it help them
if viet nam number one , i think usa number zero
hey i think if US top 1 will have much commment
why give picture Good morning vietnam in here
next year if US in top 1 i tink use Goodbye Armerican
Sure, The U.S. Has A Lot Of Click Fraud, But At Least We’re Not Vietnam<<< U.S want are vietnam?
dont compare idiot
I also question the methodology of the research to make claims about countries like Vietnam.
what do Vietnamese people click on ads for, if they receive nothing?
Anchorintelligence.com users come from these countries:
* 71.6% United States
* 5.8% Germany
* 4.8% Australia
* 4.2% United Kingdom
* 1.4% Vietnam
* 12.0% OTHER