Content providers may derive a portion of their revenues from online advertising. The revenue may be generated by revenue generators, such as advertisers, who may pay content providers to have their advertisements displayed to users. The advertiser may maintain a funded account with the content provider through an automated system such as YAHOO!'S SEARCH MARKETING system. The system may deduct funds from the account each time the advertiser incurs a charge, such as when an advertisement of the advertiser is displayed to a user or when a user clicks on the advertiser's advertisement. When the advertiser's account is depleted of all its funds, the system may require the advertiser to replenish their account with additional funds before displaying any further advertisements.
The automated nature of a system, such as YAHOO! SEARCH MARKETING, may simplify the process of displaying ads for an advertiser; however it may also provide fraudulent advertisers with non-traditional venues for defrauding content providers and/or individual users. A fraudulent advertiser may be able to use such an automated system to direct users to scam web sites, such as a “phishing” site, where users are routinely defrauded of their credit card information and/or personal information. Since the user may have been directed to the fraudulent web site by the advertisements displayed by the content provider, the user may associate the content provider with the fraudulent web site, thereby diminishing the general good will of the content provider.
Fraudulent advertisers may also use non-traditional methods to defraud the content providers' systems. The fraudulent advertisers may be able to abuse the systems to rapidly accumulate charges in excess of the amount of funds in their account. If the fraudulent advertiser exceeds a daily budget limit that the content provider agreed to abide by or if the fraudulent advertiser funded their account with a prepaid debit or credit card, the content provider may have no opportunity to receive payment of the excessive charges.
Some current advertising platforms, such as YAHOO! SEARCH MARKETING, may rely on traditional credit verification systems for identifying fraudulent advertisers. A traditional credit verification system may rely on traditional methods in order to identify fraudulent advertisers, such as matching an advertiser's address with the address registered to the credit card used by the advertiser. These traditional credit verification systems may be unable to identify high risk advertisers who are likely to commit the non-traditional types of advertiser fraud mentioned above.