How to lose friends and influence people
Bad behavior sometimes gets caught, and sometimes it sends messages, mixed ones.
SEOmoz recently wrote about a court case in which NetQuote successfully sued MostChoice for submitting false insurance quote requests. Their behavior was so blatant (hiring someone to submit requests for 20-25 hours each week) that the jury doubled the punitive damages requested by NetQuote.
We hope that this case scares off some fraud, but it is unlikely to do so for the more sophisticated practitioners who are more careful about covering their tracks. There is also a scary little detail in the case for the message it sends: the court threw out a counter-suit about click fraud. This appears to have been justified by the low volume of clicks and the intent of conducting competitive research, but it may also provide cover for people doing outright click fraud. We hope that this cover is illusory.
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