Fake Facebook Traffic - HUUUGE SPIKE

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I'm going to jump onto the bandwagon and admit that the fraud click shit-storm hit me today to. At this point it looks like I got literally thousands of erroneous and fraudulent clicks, some IP's hitting up to 5 times like Vlad mentioned also.

It would make sense that it's just an affiliate or handful of them who feel like driving down our epc's and running up fraudulent click charges would flush out their competition. There's one problem with the bright theory though, this is our BUSINESS. We analyze every little piece of data we can get our hands on. Would we not be complete idiots to take notice of all of this? If they had any sort of common sense they would have gradually began raping us. We would have slowly pulled away from FB as it began to seem less profitable.

As far as FB is concerned, with a company of their size this should have been resolved before it even had a chance to occur. Why are their no fraud preventative measures in place? Leaves me clueless. FB reps, employees, anyone? Pretty sure you're reading these threads?

Mods, why not change the thread title to something a little more meaty, something their PR dept. might take notice of?
 
I know that certain scrapers will not cause clicks....easy way to test is have one scrape your own ad, then measure.
I dont think this issue is scrapers...its bot clickers running up competitors ads...
 
I call it the facebook tax. I actually think it gives me insane CTR on some shitty ads. Which helps me get a shitload of impressions.... when otherwise i would not.... it might actually be helping me.... ahahaha
 
Why would scrapers need to click on the ad multiple times in a row though? Once I can understand but not 5 times in less than a minute.
 
I pressed on show filtered clicks on p202 on one campaign.... its just insane whats happening now.... here is another screen shot

29fupsm.jpg
 
That IP resolves to a Bell DSL line in Toronto.. fbcopter is in Montreal, but there's nothing stopping them from leasing a dsl in Toronto.

Interesting...
 
Pretty ironic that I'm also seeing a ton of bell dsl hosts, but they're all here in the US, mostly in TX.

I've noticed the 15% or so of the fraudulent clicks that are actually being charged but I'm receiving boatloads more than just those. My theory is that these guys are having their bots scrape the ads and landing page url's and then continuing to flood them with direct traffic. Most of them are landing without a referrer following their first time.

Anyone else seeing similar shit?
 
Pretty ironic that I'm also seeing a ton of bell dsl hosts, but they're all here in the US, mostly in TX.

I've noticed the 15% or so of the fraudulent clicks that are actually being charged but I'm receiving boatloads more than just those. My theory is that these guys are having their bots scrape the ads and landing page url's and then continuing to flood them with direct traffic. Most of them are landing without a referrer following their first time.

Anyone else seeing similar shit?


yes



and today I'm approaching 30% duplicates / filtered out traffic.
 
Yup, what's disturbing to me the most is that the duplicate IP clicks are from different ads and different demographics. This fuck must have quite a few accounts running different demos to get these types of clicks.
 
Quote:

Pretty ironic that I'm also seeing a ton of bell dsl hosts, but they're all here in the US, mostly in TX.

I've noticed the 15% or so of the fraudulent clicks that are actually being charged but I'm receiving boatloads more than just those. My theory is that these guys are having their bots scrape the ads and landing page url's and then continuing to flood them with direct traffic. Most of them are landing without a referrer following their first time.

Anyone else seeing similar shit?

yes

and today I'm approaching 30% duplicates / filtered out traffic.

Similar situation here. Yesterday I got 329 clicks (tracked with statcounter and prosper). Facebook charged me for 489.


Weird thing is, although I do have a few filtered out clicks. I don't - by far - have enough to make up for the amount of clicks I am actually not getting. Nothing weird like the guy with all the netscape clicks is happening to me. The only is, I'm missing alot of clicks.
 
so guys. check it out. i haven't done this at all, seems like this would totally be fraud too, so i really advise against anyone trying to pull this -- but my theory is as follows:

someone has made a very simple script that spiders the fb ads and clicks the ads and does not follow the redirect codes. therefore, fb sees it as a click + charges you, and then you dont see a single shred of anything relating to the click anywhere on your tracking software (the script never hits your page at all, only the facebook URL).

this would seem to me to potentially explain the issues going around atm.
 
I wonder if thats a US based company, if so, that's a definite lawsuit.


edit: canada

copter, fb admin@fbcopter.info
5 Main St.
Montreal, Quebec H3A 2L1
Canada
(514) 781-7598

also their website lists

1-702-548-5987

as a contact number

anybody in montreal wanna go break a few legs?

Fake whois, there is no Main st. in that area.

This would be the real one:

2075 University St., Suite 1030
Montreal, Quebec H3A 2L1
Canada

But I suspect that it may just be a mail drop.
 
so guys. check it out. i haven't done this at all, seems like this would totally be fraud too, so i really advise against anyone trying to pull this -- but my theory is as follows:

someone has made a very simple script that spiders the fb ads and clicks the ads and does not follow the redirect codes. therefore, fb sees it as a click + charges you, and then you dont see a single shred of anything relating to the click anywhere on your tracking software (the script never hits your page at all, only the facebook URL).

this would seem to me to potentially explain the issues going around atm.

You're probably correct on this one, it certainly seems that way. The traffic will never get to your LP and you will only see the clicks being counted at FB. I checked my raw apache logs and for me the average is about 15% - 20%, depending on the day - then an additional 5% or so that seem fraudulent that do hit the LP. This is a staggering loss. I would not be surprised if these are some fucks trying to kick other affs off FB.

I would suggest for all of you that are experiencing the same to email FB and letting them know. FB will never admit to this, but if enough of us start raising hell, they will have to take note and act.
 
And this is exactly why I stopped running facebook!

Thanks for reminding me of what a disaster it is.

At least back in the day the only fraud I saw is someone messing with Acai/Colon ads, but now it seems like no niche is safe.
 
I stopped running a lot of my Facebook campaigns due to the same reason. Somethings definitely going on and the amount of clicks that are coming into campaigns that never reach the landing pages are making some campaigns dip into negative ROI just from these clicks.

I've emailed Jeff Iden about it but he never answers anything.
 
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