Microsoft has filed a lawsuite against three individuals in Vancouver, British Columbia – Gordon Lam, Eric lam and Melanie Suen plus several corporations and unnamed parties. In the said lawsuit, Microsoft seeks around $750,000 in damages.
The lawsuit was filed after Microsoft found out several patterns of click fraud done on its search pages. Sometime last year, the incidence of click fraud was reported to Microsoft by several auto insurance advertisers who noticed the sudden increase of visitors coming to their sites from paid ads running on Microsoft’s search pages.
After a thorough investigation Microsoft found out there the similar pattern was present in paids for World of Warcraft. They noticed that the traffic was coming from different computers but both are coming from two proxy servers.
Wondering why paid ads for auto-insurance and World of Warcraft are exhibiting similar click patterns, further Microsoft study revealed that the ads for World of Warcraft under the name of Eric lam is also redirecting traffic to auto-insurance web sites.
Some more investigation revealed the names of Eric Lam and his party.
Microsoft’s theory was a bit interesting. They said think that Eric Lam maybe related to a low-ranking site. But instead of competing head-to-head, Lam’s strategy was to exhaust the ad budget of competitor websites until such time that their advertising money has run out.
But whatever the reason is, Microsoft still gets to file his lawsuit against Lam and Co.