The Google way to bankrupt your rival

Carreras became convinced the "missing clicks" weren't from customers but from his competitors, who had been in Vegas with him. He believed his unscrupulous rivals whiled away their office hours clicking on his Google ads, knowing that every tap cost him money.

If you add in a second kind of scam, where people earn themselves a little money from Google by clicking on ads they're hosting on their sites, you can see the potential for malice.

As a result of his experience, he got out of the trade exhibition business, believing that click-fraud detection would be a more lucrative field. He now sells software under the name Who's Clicking Who? that promises to solve click fraud for Google advertisers, first by sending "we know who you are" messages back to fraudulent clickers, and then by compiling click dossiers to help fraud victims reclaim their money from Google.

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