TOKYO (MacHouse) – Last week, we reported that new advertising network Blue Advertise engages in a fraudulent scheme in online advertising. We now have a better understanding of what Blue Advertise is doing and who else is involved in this public ad fraud scheme.
We learned about Blue Advertise through another advertising network called AdToll, which advertises Blue Advertise’s website on the pay-per-click basis. (See Screenshot 1.) If you place an ad code from Blue Advertise, you are likely to place one of the public ad banners at your website. Such advertisers include Drug-Free America and AdCouncil. And you are promised to get paid at least US$00.12 for every 1,000 impressions.
But your website won’t be exactly used to advertise the website of any of those non-profit organizations. No. 1, Blue Advertise doesn’t earn much by displaying public ads, at least, not ones from AdCouncil. As for AdCouncil, they only allow organizations located in North America to use their banners while Blue Advertise is located in Central Europe. (See Screenshot 2 – Source: psacentral.adcouncil.org.) In fact, Agela Hui, a representative of AdCouncil, writes,
“We are not associated with Blue Advertise in any way and will contact them to remove us from their network.” “We are definitely not a part of this and it is not in the Ad Council policy to pay for any kind of media.”
Blue Advertise’s fraudulent scheme is such that they use free NPO banners to make it look like they are passing some of their ad revenue to publishers. But publishers are actually advertising other websites besides those of NPOs. Blue Advertise’s fraudulent scheme is such that they add links to the websites of their associates in the way that publishers aren’t aware of. The websites participating in this fraudulent scheme include those of
paid-to-promote.net, ppc-parked.domainsite.com, itsptp.com, searchportal.information.com, fxlayer.net, revenue.net, validall.com, pay-ads.com, netsearch.cc.
When we first reported Blue Advertise’s unfair practice a week ago, we tried to contact itsptp.com and pay-ads.com. But they have not been available for comments. As for AdToll, Dan Rucci, Account Manager of AdToll.com, wrote
“They have paid for their advertising so no we will let the campaign run out.” “I would actually appreciate it if possible you can remove the referral of our name to a scam site.”
At the time of writing this report, AdToll was still advertising Blue Advertise’s website through its Run of Network.
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