If the $100 million advertising campaign wasn’t enough to convince you that Microsoft is serious about its new search engine–and the New York Post says Google’s convinced–maybe the fact that Microsoft is suing people for click fraud will be. (Click fraud is when you get people or programs to repeatedly click online ads to make more money for yourself or exhaust a competitor’s advertising budget, so their ads don’t appear or lose top placement.) Now that it’s got Bing, Microsoft will not have people messing with search engine results!
The Lam/Suen family–Brothers Eric and Gordon Lam, Mom Melanie Suen–was allegedly using click fraud to make more money for their site WoWMine.com–mainly by clicking competitors’ ads until their competitors’ ad budgets were exhausted. Thus, Microsoft is suing them for $750,000. The site sells virtual gold for the popular role-playing game, World of Warcraft, (the game’s makers don’t support this illicit gold dealing) and also apparently also sells info to auto insurance advertisers–which explains why the Lam/Suen family was allegedly click-frauding not just WoW gold ads but also auto insurance ones.

A quick check of court records confirms that this is among the nerdiest scams ever.

Popularity: 5% [?]