Click Fraud 101: What You Should Know about Invalid Clicks in 2025

While a lot of ad fraud is committed using bot programs that fill out forms and generate fake leads, those aren’t the only tools that fraudsters use. To make their click fraud and other ad fraud schemes even harder to identify, fraudsters may also use human fraud farms (or. click farms) to conduct their schemes.

What is Click Fraud?

Click fraud is when bots, malware, or a human fraudster intentionally generates a bogus click on paid ads and links to steal money from pay-per-click advertisers or to exhaust an advertisers’ campaign budget.

What is a Click Farm?

A click farm is a fraud organization that leverages large groups of cheap workers to manually click on paid ads online.

Like their bot counterparts, human click farms wreak havoc on the digital advertising ecosystem. Click farms have people clicking on ads with no intention of converting. They just visit sites and rack up worthless impressions.

Click farms may also sometimes leverage form bots to fill out forms with bogus information, generating false leads. This can be a real nightmare for online advertisers who need reliable leads.

How Click Farms Work

Watch this recent video to learn more about how click farms work:

Reasons Fraudsters Use Click Farms

Click farms can be used to fill a variety of goals on the behalf of the farm’s customers. Some of the reasons that fraudsters have used click farms include:

1. Attacking Competition

Sometimes, outside “customers” hire click farms to sabotage their competitor’s digital ad campaigns. For a certain price, farm workers click through ads in an effort to eat up the competing advertiser’s budget. Once their competitor’s funds run dry, the farm customer’s ads have a better chance of appearing before consumers.

This is often used in Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns to rapidly drain a target’s ad budget. The fraudster just has their “farmers” repeatedly click on the competitor’s Google SERP display ads until they’ve eaten up the whole ad budget. This PPC advertising scam allows fraudsters to run their own ads virtually unopposed even when they’re targeting extremely expensive keywords.

2. Generating Revenue from Ads and Fake Social Profiles

Click farms are also used to directly benefit the farmer financially. Some fraudsters create websites built strictly for advertising purposes, using networks like Google to sell ad space. Once legitimate ads run on the page, the farmer directs their workers to interact with the ads, in turn generating revenue for themselves.

In recent years, click farm antics have invaded social media too, as we’ve seen with click fraud on fake Facebook profiles. Clicks farms on Facebook may hit a lot of likes, but they can drive down engagement rates and hurt your company’s Facebook profile in the long term.

Look up “click farm Facebook,” and you’ll find a list of stories about click farms being used on Facebook, advice for avoiding click farms, and other information about these false click operations.

Instead of clicks, many farms now sell profiles, users, or accounts. Because these accounts are created by actual human users, often with seemingly legitimate information, they can successfully pass security filters on social platforms like Twitter and Instagram.

3. Obfuscating Their Fraud Activity

One of the reasons fraudsters use click farms is that human fraud detection is tough. Unlike bot activity, human behavior is more nuanced and less predictable. This makes it considerably harder for simple click fraud protection tools to reliably identify and stop click fraud from these farms.

Back then, platforms like Google and Yahoo implemented early-stage fraud filters—which today are no match for more sophisticated schemes. But the filters did a terrible job at blocking fake clicks made by what seemed like real site visitors.

So, click farms enabled fraudsters to bypass basic click fraud prevention measures to continue illicitly collecting ad revenue.

Invalid Clicks and Social Media: When Engagement Isn’t Real

Likes, shares, and follows have become the social currency of the digital world. What started as a simple way to show appreciation for a post has evolved into a major metric for measuring online influence. Today, marketers and advertisers rely heavily on engagement numbers to gauge the success of their content and campaigns.

But not all engagement is genuine.

Fraudsters have found ways to game the system using click farms—groups of real people paid to like, follow, or engage with content en masse. These operations artificially inflate social media metrics, making profiles look more popular than they really are. It’s a tactic designed to manipulate visibility algorithms and deceive both audiences and advertisers.

The problem? These fake interactions distort your marketing data. You might see a post racking up hundreds of likes but getting little to no meaningful interaction or conversion. That’s a clear sign those likes aren’t coming from an engaged audience: they’re likely invalid clicks generated by a click farm or automation.

In our world where social proof drives perception, it’s easy to get heavily caught up in the numbers. Spotting and filtering out invalid clicks on social platforms is crucial if you want your engagement metrics to reflect real interest.

You can’t afford to let fake likes drive your strategy. With a real-time fraud solution like Anura, you can separate true engagement from fraudulent noise—and make every click count.

The Problem with Fake Likes/Upvotes and Engagement

Facebook (and other social media sites) often use likes or upvotes and other user engagement data to gauge the popularity of a post. This, in turn, affects how that post is delivered to other users and what ads to run (if any).

High engagement rates tell social media platform providers that the page in question is legitimate or authoritative in some way—increasing the likelihood that the post will be promoted to other users.

For example, if thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of people click on the “like” button on a Facebook post and then add thousands of comments, that post may be recommended to more people in their feed.

However, if likes are all that your post gets and nobody leaves a comment, that could bring your engagement rate down and hurt the chances of your post being promoted to others. Unfortunately, when you work with a fraudster who’s using click farms to artificially inflate their engagement, the “fans” they send your way will likely just be the workers at the click farm: and they’ll just view and like your posts before quickly moving on to other things.

One of the major problems with getting fake likes from a fraudster’s click farm is that it skews your marketing data. The like button is a key tool in building user profiles. Facebook can map out a person’s demographic and psychographic info based on what pages and posts they like. This is a huge asset as you can easily drill into your audience stats.

However, if half the audience is built on fake likes, that data won’t be accurate. This means that Facebook (and other platforms) may start trying to put your content in front of an unsuitable audience.

Although purchasing likes isn’t technically illegal, the practice does go against Facebook’s terms of service. The platform has issued statements against phony likes, emphasizing they will “aggressively go after the bad actors behind fake likes because businesses and people who use [their] platform want real connections and results.”

How Easy is it to Create Fake Profiles for Click Farms?

To generate a like, even a fraudster needs a social media account to associate with that activity. This means providing data like name, address, email, phone number, and birthdate. You might assume that this hurdle would be difficult to clear for a fraudster, but it really isn’t. Generating a Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, or other social media account can be incredibly simple.

Fraudsters often have access to a massive database of real consumer data that they’ve either stolen themselves or bought from cybercriminals on the dark web. They can simply copy/paste the data from the table and tweak the email address and they’re good to go.

With over 7 billion people on the planet, it isn’t unusual for Facebook and other social platforms to have a few repeated names or even addresses. You could even open up a second Facebook profile for yourself that uses all of the same information (including name, address, and phone number) with relative ease—all you’d really need to change is your email.

You would get a text message that looks something like this:

You might get a notification that your data was removed/changed on your main account because it was used and verified on another account, but that wouldn’t stop the creation of the second account.

So, creating fake accounts on Facebook is easy—and there’s nothing really stopping fraudsters from just creating a million “John Smith” profiles with slightly tweaked information using free Google email accounts, either. Fraudsters and their click farm operations exploit these flaws to the fullest.

How Click Farms Boost Fraudsters

An investigation by Doug Bock Clark for New Republic examined the underground world of click farms. In his visit to an “account farm” in the Philippines, Clark observed how fake users are made for commercial purposes.

A farm worker starts building a fake persona using readily available name generators. Some generators spit out only first and last names, but others go more in-depth, randomizing info like mailing addresses and birthdays. Next, the worker creates a throwaway email account for the “user.”

Then comes the actual Facebook sign-up. The “user” has a name and an email address, but Facebook wants a mobile phone number too, for verification purposes. No worries, the worker’s got that covered. A new SIM card in an old cell phone will do the trick.

Facebook sends a confirmation text, the worker types in the code, and, just like that, a new verified user has joined the network—adding to the estimated 81,000,000 fake users on the site. Farm owners can then sell the “user” for likes and follows.

We already know the text message test is easy to beat. But Facebook has other measures in place to weed out fake accounts. The network uses an algorithm—one they won’t disclose—to determine if users are real or bots.

However, depending on the account farm’s production standards, fake user profiles usually pass the test. The more legitimate the profile appears, i.e. the more information is filled out, the less likely Facebook will flag it as fake.

It also doesn’t help that actual humans, not software, are the ones setting up and controlling the accounts. Because real people are behind the scenes, account actions, such as liking posts, seem more organic compared to bot behavior.

Other Forms of Invalid Clicks You Shouldn’t Ignore

Click fraud isn’t limited to bots or click farms. Some invalid clicks come from real people, but with the wrong intent. These clicks may not be malicious, but they still waste budget, skew metrics, and damage your campaign’s effectiveness. Here are a few additional types of invalid clicks advertisers need to watch for:

Incentivized Clicks

These clicks come from real users who are paid—or rewarded—to engage with ads. Reward apps and paid-to-click websites offer points, money, or access to content in exchange for ad interaction. While the traffic looks real on the surface, it lacks genuine interest. The result? Engagement metrics go up, but conversions stay flat. You're paying for performance that doesn’t move the needle.

Accidental Clicks

Sometimes visitors click on an ad by mistake. Often due to poor placement, mobile “fat finger” taps, or deceptive UI design. These clicks may be unintentional, but still.. they’ll cost you money and clutter your data with traffic that was never interested in your product. Accidental clicks can quietly drain your budget if not properly filtered out.

Click Quality Degradation

Click quality refers to how likely a click is to lead to a meaningful outcome like a sale, signup, or lead. When bots, click farms, and incentivized users dominate your traffic, overall click quality drops. Even if your campaigns are driving high volumes, your ROI will suffer if those clicks aren’t coming from real prospects. High-volume, low-quality traffic is a common red flag that invalid clicks are present.

3 Ways Click Fraud Can Derail Your Ad Campaigns

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising continues to be one of the most cost-effective ways to generate leads. While traditional advertising methods like TV, radio, and print can cost upwards of $600 per lead, digital channels offer a far more efficient alternative. According to recent industry data by Uplead.com, the average cost per lead is around $110 for search engine marketing and just $38 for programmatic display ads—making digital strategies significantly more scalable and budget-friendly for performance-driven teams.

In fact, Google states that: “businesses generally make an average of $2 in revenue for every $1 they spend on Google Ads.” This has led to the PPC advertising market growing significantly over the years. Fortune Business Insights projects that the PPC market will grow from its 2019 value of $12.58 billion to $28.62 billion by 2027—despite the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

And, of course, where there’s money, there will be fraudsters looking for an easy score. How does click fraud affect your ad campaigns? Here are a few of the negative impacts of click fraud:

1. Wasted Ad Spend

The most obvious impact of click fraud is the way that it wastes your online marketing budget. The falsified charges can quickly drain your ad budget without providing any real return on investment (since the clicks are coming from fraudulent sources that won’t convert into real customers).

Just how much does click fraud cost advertisers in a year? According to Statista, the global cost of digital ad fraud is expected hit $172 billion by 2028—a sharp increase that highlights the escalating threat businesses face in the digital advertising space. This includes not only the lost ad revenue that was wasted, but the additional costs that businesses incur in trying to deal with the other impacts of fraud. Click fraud represents a significant fraction of that total cost.

2. Distorted Marketing Results Data

When your company creates ad campaigns, it is common to use past marketing results to form the basis of future ad campaigns. But, what happens when that past data is faulty?

When you have faulty data and try to apply it to your pay on click advertising (or any other type of ad campaign), you will quickly find that your ads aren’t going to the right audiences at the right time, the messaging is ineffective, and that the leads you do get aren’t as good as you would expect.

Skewed marketing data that is corrupted with fraudulent activity from click farms can cripple your future ad campaigns unless you’re able identify it and exclude it.

3. Reduced Lifetime for PPC Ad Campaigns

One of the goals of click fraud, when used by an unscrupulous competitor, is that it can cut the duration of your PPC advertising campaigns short. For example, say you set a daily limit on your PPC campaign clicks to prevent cost overruns.

Using a click farm and bots, a fraudster could generate hundreds of thousands of clicks on your ads in mere minutes—effectively removing your PPC ads from Google search and other platforms. Then, the competitor can stop the fake clicks for the day as their own ads start to display.

This tactic prevents legitimate leads from seeing your ads so your ROI is minimized.

How to Spot Click Fraud Early

Keep an eye out for these red flags in your campaign data. They’re often the first signs something is not right.

5 Tips for Click Fraud Detection and Prevention

So, what can you do to prevent click fraud in your current and future ad campaigns? How can you keep fraudsters from profiting or blowing through your daily advertising spending limits and ensure your ads generate a positive ROI?

Here are a few suggestions to get you started:

1. Don’t Buy Likes or Followers on Social Media

Artificially inflating likes, subscribers, followers, etc. on social media just isn’t worth it. You’ll spend money on an activity that pretends to make your social media presence look bigger than it is, but the skewed metrics from bought leads won’t help social networks accurately identify your audience so your content can be presented to them.

So, it’s best to avoid poisoning your own marketing data and resist the siren’s calls of bought likes and followers.

2. Spend Time Tweaking Your PPC Ad Targeting Parameters

Setting strong targeting parameters around your Facebook ad campaigns gives you another layer of protection against unwanted clicks. The social network made it easier than ever to target users specifically by metrics like location, age, gender, and interests. You can even use metrics to exclude groups of users from seeing your ad.

If you’re running a business page, it’s a good idea to periodically check your follower list for questionable accounts. In your Page settings, click on People and Other Pages to view a list of your followers. Here, you can individually remove or ban accounts you deem suspicious from engaging with your content.

This same advice can be applied to other marketing channels, too. Of course, to make your targeting as accurate as possible, you need to have good, clean data that is free from fraudulent activity.

3. Don’t Buy Ad Space from Publishers You Can’t Talk To

Unfortunately, not every publisher of ads or supply-side platform (SSP) provider will be on the up-and-up. There are fraudulent companies out there that specialize in taking your money and running your ads using click farms to make it look like they’re getting results when they really aren’t.

It’s not uncommon for some publishers to create a fake persona. If their reputation is already bad in the ad space, they need a cover because they’ve been blacklisted by several sites for providing bad traffic. So, they’ll pose as some other person or company, take your money, then run off.

By the time you’ve realized that they were a fraudulent advertising partner, it’s too late: they’re gone with the money.

When looking for an advertising partner, it helps to not only reach out to them directly and get a personal meeting (or at least a phone or video conference), but to reach out to other companies that they claimed as customers to ask what their experience was. Vetting ad partners can be a crucial step for ad fraud prevention, as it helps you spot a fraudster early.

4. Keep Track of Where Your Traffic and Clicks Come From

Do you know where your clicks are coming from? If you don’t, that can mean you’re an easy target for a click farm operation. “Leads” that come in from regions where your company doesn’t do business aren’t really leads at all since they cannot convert, no matter what.

So, if you’re operating primarily in Cincinnati, Ohio, but your clicks are all coming from an IP address registered to somewhere in China or Russia, you might be getting clicks from an overseas sweatshop running a click farm.

Of course, more sophisticated click farms might use virtual private networks (VPNs) to hide where their clicks are coming from. However, if you notice that a lot of your traffic that isn’t converting is all coming from a VPN provider’s data center IP address, that could be a good indicator of fraud.

Another issue with doing this manually is that it can take a lot of time to review your IP address info and determine if the activity really is fraudulent. This gives the fraudster a large window of opportunity to cut and run with your marketing money. Simply blacklisting IP addresses isn’t ideal either—since that risks throwing out the baby with the proverbial bathwater.

For example, say you blacklist an IP address used by a popular VPN service. What about all of the legitimate leads who use that service to protect their private data online?

5. Use an Ad Fraud Solution

To really put a stop to click fraud, you need to be able to flag fraudulent clicks as they happen. However, real-time ad fraud detection is virtually impossible with manual methods.

This is where Anura’sad fraud solution can be a lifesaver for your PPC ad campaigns. Our ad fraud solution checks hundreds of data points about website visitors and compares it to a decade of real conversion data to accurately identify fraud while eliminating the risk of false positives.

When a lead is tagged as fraud in real time, you can proactively prevent payments from being disbursed to the fraudster. This is far easier and less resource-consuming than trying to hunt a fraudster down and reclaiming the ill-gotten money through a lawsuit.

Additionally, Anura gives you access to the data you need to demonstrate why a particular lead or click was flagged as fraud. This way, you can confront the fraudster directly and show your PPC advertising networks the reason why you’re demanding a refund.

For advertising platforms, the ability to spot a fraudulent click in real time can be a lifesaver, too—since it allows them to invalidate the click so it doesn’t count against their customer’s ad campaign in the first place. This reduces the risk of chargebacks, complaints, and lawsuits while making for happier advertising customers who will want to spend more money because they’re getting good leads.

Stop paying for Invalid Clicks. Start Seeing Real Results.Invalid clicks aren’t just annoying; it’s expensive! Wheter it’s bots, click farms, or shady competitors, your ad budget deserves better. Anura’s real-time detection stops fraud before it drains your spend and gives you the data to prove it.

Reach out to us today to start protecting every click!