$10,000 a Week in Click Fraud, Traced to a Competitor

A group of international travel agencies was bleeding money on advertising it never had a chance to convert. Someone was running a coordinated click-fraud campaign against them, draining more than $10,000 a week by burning through their ad budget with fake traffic. The attack was built to be untraceable, routed through hundreds of IP addresses hidden behind international proxies.

Signal inside the noise

The first job was separating fraudulent activity from the legitimate campaign traffic buried around it. At that volume, the fraud hides in plain sight. We built filtering to stop the bleeding, then worked to quantify the real financial and operational damage the fake leads had already caused, so the client understood the true scope rather than a guess.

One click, one browser, one competitor

Proxies are meant to make this kind of work impossible. They are not perfect. We tracked the clicks patiently and traced a single one back to the actual browser behind it. That browser did not belong to a faceless bot farm. It tied directly to a competitor’s system. The people draining the client’s budget were the people who stood to gain from the client’s decline.

From nuisance to accountability

Once the campaign had a name behind it, the client’s options changed completely. What had looked like an unstoppable, anonymous drain became a documented case with a responsible party, opening the door to legal and preventative action. Identifying who is behind an attack turns a cost you absorb into a case you can act on. That is the heart of our cyber crime investigations.

If fraudulent traffic or a competitor’s interference is costing you money you cannot explain, talk to our team.

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