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According to a recent study by Click Forensics, pay per click fraud is getting sophisticated day by day.

Click fraud occurs in pay per click online advertising mostly contextual ads when a person, automated script, or bot clicks on an ad, for the purpose of generating a charge per click without having actual interest in the target of the ad’s link. Advertisers have to pay for bogus clicks on text ads.

The figures released by Click Foensics, which monitors click fraud, shows that its rate hasn’t changed much over the past few months. Currently pay per click fraud stands at 16.2 of total clicks in second quarter. Previously it was 16.1 percent in first quarter.

The data was obtained from their Click Fraud Network, which has drawn participation from more than 4,000 advertisers and ad agencies.

According to Click Forensics President Tom Cuthbert, it is getting harder to detect as fraudsters are using sophisticated techniques. He said:

Although click fraud rates were relatively unchanged in the second quarter, we found that the methods used to commit click fraud have become increasingly more sophisticated and difficult to detect.

Google AdWords is a victim of such fraud as it is the largest pay per click contextual advertising program in the world. They have taken certain measures to tackle like identifying multiple clicks from same IP address, cookie based tracking e.t.c but still they are no where near eliminating this menace.

Specifically, botnets–networks of compromised computers or zombies that can be controlled remotely–now account for more than a quarter of click fraud traffic for the first time.

Google recently made headlines when they agreed to a $90 million settlement fund in the class action lawsuit filed by Lane’s Gifts & Collectibles over click fraud.

Pay per click fraud is a matter of life and death for Google as their whole income depends on it.