The LeapFish Chronicles: “Admitting To Click Fraud Is An Interesting Business Model.”

When we first covered LeapFish , once a domain name appraisal service, they had just launched a new meta search engine which I claimed no one would ever use . Practically immediately after posting, we were flooded with anonymous comments praising the service, all coming from the same IP address and within half an hour (CEO Ben Behrouzi later apologized for the astroturfing). But there were other reports on the net that showed the employees were indeed painting a far better picture of the company than the reality would suggest. Some of those targeted blogged about their experiences of being approached by super-aggressive sales people from LeapFish, which is ok up to a point. But I have never heard of sales tactics like this: blatantly committing click fraud to drive up the advertising cost for potential clients using other systems in the hopes that they would be inclined to switch to LeapFish instead, and bragging about it to those potential clients! And that's exactly what happened this morning.