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August 31, 2006

Biz Ethics Evaluator Committing AdSense ClickFraud?

Her corporate psych firm serves the likes of Halliburton, its subsidiary Kellogg-Brown and Root, Merrill Lynch and Company, Bear Stearns and Company, and the US in Iraq and
Hurricane Katrina-affected regions. Now she's suing Google for $250K. She says Google wasted her staff's time and damaged her repuation.

Google, however, says she clicked on the AdSense ads running on her site in an alleged attempt to defraud the system. Hmmm…and you'd think somebody serving a client like Halliburton would be on the up and up….

According to an eWeek story, Theresa B. Bradley, management consultant and owner of Brava Corp., filed a 25-page complaint earlier this week in San Francisco federal district court accusing the search behemoth of fraud and misrepresentation, " including misrepresentation in commercial advertising, and of 'willfull, wanton, fraudulent and malicious' conduct regarding its AdSense product."

She requested that Google remove a bunch of ads from her site she deemed competitive to the product brands featured in the "World of Products" section (5HTP Synergy vitamin capsules, Pevonia Botanica skincare products, and a book and audio CDs by Daniel Amen, MD entitled, "10 Steps to Building Values within Children.") It's unclear whether she ever actually enabled ecommerce functionality on the hodge-podge site, since now below the term "Shopping Cart" on some product pages it says "visit us at a later date."

In the end, Google kicked her site off the AdSense network all together. Bradley contends her employees devoted 100 hours to setting up AdSense ads on the site. (I wonder, does that include the time spent perpetrating alleged AdSense click fraud?)

Of course we don't know whether Bradley actually clicked on the ads in order to obtain more AdSense dollars. The story notes she "denied clicking on the ads except to verify that the advertisers were not selling competing products."

It also mentions that she filed suit in San Jose federal district court against Yahoo on August 1.

Posted by Kate Kaye at August 31, 2006 11:36 AM

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