EQUTE — A joint effort by the National Cyber-Forensics and Training Alliance and the FBI shut down the largest click fraud ring ever seen.

The fraud ring, dubbed DormRing1 because it was centered in dorms around China, racked up $3 million in fraudulent clicks in just two weeks.

A great infographic from Anchor Intelligence shows all the 200,000 compromised IP addresses (in red) that slammed some 2,000 advertisers.

“We have seen 200 fraud rings,” says Anchor VP Richard Sim, “and this one by far trumps them all. I think it is indicative of how sophisticated the click fraud is getting. We are seeing the sheer scale and size of these rings growing.”

The ring is now closed, and the money was never paid, but it serves as a good reminder for any advertiser to keep track of their stats and watch for any strange spikes in clicks. Anti-fraud software can do most of the work for you.

What Is Click Fraud

The click fraud ring brings up a few questions, notably the basic “how do these people make money.”

Click fraud occurs when someone sets up a web site, signs up with an ad network, and then clicks on the ads to generate ad revenues with false clicks. DormRing1 operated the same way, except it easily involved more than 1,000 people who set up more than 10,000 Websites to spread out the fraud.

TechCrunch reported that these fraudsters took a play out of the Google Money playbook.

Spreading the click fraud out across thousands of sites makes it harder to detect, but it also requires a lot more people to perpetrate it. DormRing1 recruited student click fraud workers on Chinese social networks where and forums participants would post images of checks they were getting for their activities. One drummed up interest by talking about his plans to buy a car with the proceeds. Just like with any criminal organization, people at the lower rungs had to do a lot of grunt work to move up the ladder of trust and money.