Click frauds happen in almost all networks.

Ad networks keep fighting click fraud and fraudsters figure out new and ingenious ways to trick the network.

Now, imagine the network does click fraud on its own.

That’s exactly what Facebook seems to be doing.

Image credit: Jonathan Thomas.

Here’s how Facebook click fraud works

Facebook gives you an option to pay for website clicks.

You create an ad. Get it approved. The ad goes live. You get traffic.

Sounds simple, right?

I tried to set up a Facebook ad for a smaller budget (INR 1000 per day), and created 4 ad variations. Waited for a day and a half.

No traffic.

I tried to increase CPC and change targeting. Again, no movement.

Finally, I decided to increase my budget to INR 3,000.

Within an hour or so, I get an SMS saying that my credit card got charged by Facebook.

Wondering what happened, I head over to Facebook and look at the reports. Happily enough, I got around 190+ clicks to my website.

Since I didn't get any notification of leads (I have a lead capture on my page with a conversion rate of 30%+), I went and checked my analytics to understand what happened.

The links were UTM tagged, so it was relatively straight forward. Here’s the screenshot of my Google Analytics.