Click spam

Click spam, also called click flooding, is a numbers game. The fraudster sends enormous volumes of clicks that no user knowingly made, often fired in the background of a page or app. Most do nothing. A small fraction happen to line up with a real person who later buys, and the fraudster claims the credit under the attribution rules.

In the search arbitrage world the variant is flooding a feed with ad clicks or search requests to pick up whatever is paid before filters catch up. It also pollutes the data an honest arbitrageur relies on: if a source's clicks are spam, conversion rate and RPC figures for that source mean nothing.

Red flags are very high click counts with tiny conversion rates, a long and flat delay between click and conversion (real interest converts quickly, luck does not), many clicks from the same device or address, and click volumes that exceed page views.

Search engines discard repeated and patterned clicks as invalid. Arbitrageurs protect themselves with frequency limits, per-source analysis and post-click analysis.

Think of it like this

It is someone stuffing every letterbox in town with a voucher bearing their name, then claiming a referral fee whenever any resident buys anything.