Entrepreneur Magazine‘s December issue includes a short article about click fraud. What is click fraud, you say?

Companies can advertise their wares via pay-per-click advertisements. These are usually very short, with a few key words and a link to the advertisers website. Using services such as Google, the companies pay each time someone clicks on one of their ads.

Many of the pay-per-click (PPC) services track the clicks, and can detect some level of fraudulent clicking. This includes multiple clicks from the same IP address or rapid, repetitive clicking. This type of clicking is generally done in an attempt to increase the charges to the advertiser or to increase the revenue of the website that posted the ad.

Read the article here.

More interesting info on click fraud is also found here on the CNET News.com site. They say that Google created a “fraud squad” to monitor potential click schemes.