Care to tell us for which advertising site and which site you are using this for? I'm sure I'm not the only one who would like to alert the advertising company of what you are doing. It's called fraud. Stop it. "Earn" your popups the proper way or don't earn at all. And don't post any more questions about this. I wish people would stop submitting proper answers to you. I wish even more that your nodes would start to be reaped.
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I for one wouldn't want to contact the advertisement site. I hate popups. If a company is foolish enough to do payouts based on Referer information, that let them be sucked. Eventually, they'll lose money and stop selling popups. The world will be a better place.
It's called fraud.
It is? Which law is being broken? In which jurisdiction?
I wish people would stop submitting proper answers to you.
I wish people weren't cowards who post serious allegations anonymously.
Abigail
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Actually the collapse of the banner-ad market trashed a lot of businesses back in the day. Gamespot.com, once an excellent video game resource, now is mostly subscription-only, so a lot of folks don't read it. Same for IGN. There is a lot less "freely readable web" now, more requirements for subscriptions and (at minimum) registrations. The collapse of the banner-ad market also spawned more popups, splash ad pages (see ign.com), and shockwave ads such as "punch the monkey". While fraud is only part of the problem, it is a substantial part. Sites don't pay for ads anymore because of people like freak.
Fraud helps no one. In the meantime, I'll use Mozilla Firefox to block my popups -- and I'll leave most of the banner ads on so the sites can get a bit of revenue to pay for themselves.
I figure boycotting popups client-side is perfectly within my rights, but getting money out of a company for pretending to be interested in their sponsor is dishonest.
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First let's discuss dictionary definitions. Taken from dict.org (in turn taken from Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary of 1913): "Deception deliberately practiced with a view to gaining an unlawful or unfair advantage; artifice by which the right or interest of another is injured; injurious stratagem; deceit; trick.". Providing false clicks to an advertisment company matches this description plain and clear. So yes, this is fraud; it is mostly non-legal, but see the next paragraph for that.
Next we look at your opinion:
I for one wouldn't want to contact the advertisement site. I hate popups. If a company is foolish enough to do payouts based on Referer information, that let them be sucked.
Okay that's fair, that's your opinion. If you've read any or all of freak's posts, you'd have noticed he is trying to spoof more than just m!referr?er! information. He's posted questions about every obstacle needed to completely spoof a hit to a page (anonymously). I guarantee that this breaks any kind of Terms of Service that almost any advertisement company would have. Are you stating that all Terms of Service, Terms of Use, Privacy Policies, etc. etc. are all bogus and cannot be used for legal reasons?
Don't get me wrong, I hate the advertisement companies as much as anyone else, but I won't go as far as to condone dropping to their level about things. Besides, we all know they'd find a new way of making money if the old method was someone diverted.
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