Lead fraud

Many of the advertisers who buy search-ad clicks in arbitrage verticals are lead buyers: insurers, lenders, solicitors, colleges, home-improvement firms. They do not sell online. They collect a form with a name and phone number and then call. Each completed form has a price.

Lead fraud fills those forms with rubbish. Bots type in invented or stolen identities, click farm workers paste details from a list, or real people are induced to submit forms they do not care about. The advertiser's sales team then rings numbers that are dead, wrong or answered by someone who never asked.

This is the "downstream" harm of bad arbitrage traffic. A click that was fake at the feed can become a fake lead on the advertiser's site, costing them twice. It is also why advertisers judge search partners so harshly: wasted call-centre time is more visible than a wasted click.

Signs: forms completed impossibly fast, pasted fields, repeated phone numbers or devices, a mismatch between location and details. Defences sit mostly with the advertiser, through validation and consent verification. Products such as ClearTrust's ClickTrust address invalid clicks for performance advertisers.

Think of it like this

It is someone filling a competition box with entries in made-up names. The box looks full, but none of the winners can be found.