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A pyramid scheme is a business model that recruits members via a promise of payments or services for enrolling others into the scheme, rather than supplying investments or sale of products. As recruiting multiplies, recruiting becomes quickly impossible, and most members are unable to profit; as such, pyramid schemes are unsustainable and often illegal.
Affiliate marketing is a marketing arrangement in which affiliates receive a commission for each visit, signup or sale they generate for a merchant. This arrangement allows businesses to outsource part of the sales process. It is a form of performance-based marketing where the commission acts as an incentive for the affiliate; this commission is usually a percentage of the price of the product being sold, but can also be a flat rate per referral.
An online auction is an auction held over the internet and accessed by internet connected devices. Similar to in-person auctions, online auctions come in a variety of types, with different bidding and selling rules.
Click fraud is a type of fraud that occurs on the Internet in pay-per-click (PPC) online advertising. In this type of advertising, the owners of websites that post the ads are paid based on how many site visitors click on the ads. Fraud occurs when a person, automated script, computer program or an auto clicker imitates a legitimate user of a web browser, clicking on such an ad without having an actual interest in the target of the ad's link in order to increase revenue. Click fraud is the subject of some controversy and increasing litigation due to the advertising networks being a key beneficiary of the fraud.
Pay-per-click (PPC) is an internet advertising model used to drive traffic to websites, in which an advertiser pays a publisher when the ad is clicked.
Email fraud is intentional deception for either personal gain or to damage another individual by means of email. Almost as soon as email became widely used, it began to be used as a means to defraud people. Email fraud can take the form of a "con game", or scam. Confidence tricks tend to exploit the inherent greed and dishonesty of its victims. The prospect of a 'bargain' or 'something for nothing' can be very tempting. Email fraud, as with other 'bunco schemes,' usually targets naive individuals who put their confidence in schemes to get rich quickly. These include 'too good to be true' investments or offers to sell popular items at 'impossibly low' prices. Many people have lost their life savings due to fraud.
Cost per action (CPA), also sometimes misconstrued in marketing environments as cost per acquisition, is an online advertising measurement and pricing model referring to a specified action, for example, a sale, click, or form submit.
Online advertising, also known as online marketing, Internet advertising, digital advertising or web advertising, is a form of marketing and advertising which uses the Internet to promote products and services to audiences and platform users. Online advertising includes email marketing, search engine marketing (SEM), social media marketing, many types of display advertising, and mobile advertising. Advertisements are increasingly being delivered via automated software systems operating across multiple websites, media services and platforms, known as programmatic advertising.
A high-yield investment program (HYIP) is a type of Ponzi scheme, an investment scam that promises unsustainably high return on investment by paying previous investors with the money invested by new investors.
Pay to surf (PTS) is an online business model which gained popularity in the late 1990’s and experienced a significant decline following the dot-com crash. PTS companies advertised their main advantage as sharing the advertising revenue with their user base in a form of rewards for watching promotional content over the web. In order to participate, users would need to install software that tracked their browsing activities and displayed targeted advertisements. Ultimately, users receive financial compensation for their time spent browsing the web.
Search engine marketing (SEM) is a form of Internet marketing that involves the promotion of websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs) primarily through paid advertising. SEM may incorporate search engine optimization (SEO), which adjusts or rewrites website content and site architecture to achieve a higher ranking in search engine results pages to enhance pay per click (PPC) listings and increase the Call to action (CTA) on the website.
Securities fraud, also known as stock fraud and investment fraud, is a deceptive practice in the stock or commodities markets that induces investors to make purchase or sale decisions on the basis of false information. The setups are generally made to result in monetary gain for the deceivers, and generally result in unfair monetary losses for the investors. They are generally violating securities laws.
Employment fraud is the attempt to defraud people seeking employment by giving them false hope of better employment, offering better working hours, more respectable tasks, future opportunities, or higher wages. They often advertise at the same locations as genuine employers and may ask for money in exchange for the opportunity to apply for a job.
Pay for performance advertising (P4P) is a term used in Internet marketing to define a pricing model whereby a marketing or advertising agency will receive a payment or bonus from an advertiser for 'performance'. This may be in the form of each new lead or new customer obtained for the advertiser through the agency's online marketing efforts or some other 'performance' metric the agency and client agree upon before beginning.
Pay-per-sale or PPS is an online advertisement pricing system where the publisher or website owner is paid on the basis of the number of sales that are directly generated by an advertisement. It is a variant of the CPA model, where the advertiser pays the publisher and/or website owner in proportion to the number of actions committed by the readers or visitors to the website.
A click farm is a form of click fraud where a large group of low-paid workers are hired to click on links or buttons for the click fraudster. The workers click the links, surf the target website for a period of time, and possibly sign up for newsletters prior to clicking another link. For many of these workers, clicking on enough ads per day may increase their revenue substantially and may also be an alternative to other types of work. It is extremely difficult for an automated filter to detect this simulated traffic as fake because the visitor behavior appears exactly the same as that of an actual legitimate visitor.
In Internet marketing, autosurfs are traffic exchanges that automatically rotate advertised websites in one's web browser. Therefore, they are capable of bringing a large amount of traffic to the advertised websites. Members earn credits for each site that they view, which can then be spent to advertise members' sites by adding them to the autosurf rotation. Sites may additionally be added by external advertisers who pay the autosurf operators.
Ad fraud is concerned with the practice of fraudulently representing online advertisement impressions, clicks, conversion or data events in order to generate revenue. Ad-frauds are particularly popular among cybercriminals.
References
- ↑ Click Fraud. Bloomberg Businessweek. October 2, 2006. Retrieved October 30, 2011.
- ↑ Kate DuBose Tomassi (March 9, 2006) Google's Click Fraud Settlement Seen As Non-Event. Forbes. Retrieved May 9, 2006.
- ↑ "Case 2:16-cv-00832-DB" (PDF). U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. July 26, 2016. Retrieved September 17, 2017.