Citysearch Click Fraud Warning

December 4, 2007 by admin.

I had pretty much given up writing on this blog because it seems like a waste of time and really, I had nothing much to write about. But I am having an experience with the Citysearch pay-per-click company that I think everyone should know about so that they can avoid this company like the plague. They have tried to charge my credit card for nearly US$200 for fraudulent clicks and they don’t seem willing to listen to my complaints.

First of all, as a very small business owner, I was looking for ways to promote my website (the same reason for first starting this blog), and I had signed up with 1and1.com as our ISP (no complaints about 1and1 though, they have been great!) I received vouchers for Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and one for US$25 for Citysearch. I found much better vouchers for Microsoft, Google and Yahoo elsewhere, but I thought that I would at least give Citysearch a try until the $25 credit ran out. The deal was also supposed to be that there would be no monthly charges, but the cost per click was very expensive (in my opinion) at US$.75 per click. Even so, I thought that with my small website, $25 would last a couple of months at the very least.

Once I signed up on October 7 and supposedly put my ad up on Citysearch, I looked for it for several days afterwards but could never find it. It was only supposedly listed in the Oklahoma City area Citysearch (my company is registered in Oklahoma) so how hard could it be to find it, especially since I knew what I was looking for? I never could find it, so I just assumed that they had decided not to post my ad for whatever reason and then forgot about it, until I received an email from Citysearch on November 3, stating that I was about to be invoiced. I couldn’t imagine that I had used up the $25 credit already, so I logged in to my Citysearch account. It showed that my ad supposedly ran from 10/7 to 11/1, with zero clicks everyday except for 4 days: Monday 10/22 showed 51 clicks, Tuesday 10/23 showed 25 clicks, Wednesday 10/24 showed 25 clicks, and Thursday 10/25 showed 21 clicks. All other days there was nothing. They were trying to charge me somewhere around US$97 (they have deleted this information from their website so I’m not sure on the exact amount.) Just from that alone a person would be suspicious, I mean how many people look for tours of Beijing in the Oklahoma City Citysearch website? Furthermore, I have Google Analytics set up on my website, and the TOTAL number of visitors to my website for the two months that I had been using Google Analytics was not even close to the 122 clicks that Citysearch was charging me for, and that was before I even figured out how to exclude my own computers from showing our own visits to the website. I emailed Citysearch to complain and cancel my account (there was no way to do it through their website, and I could not remove my credit card information) but I heard nothing back. I checked my account a few days later, and the $97 charge was gone, so I assumed all was ok. WRONG! I got my credit card bill on November 29, and Citysearch had charged me $66.50 on 11/8/07, then $40.50 11/16/07, this time without telling me that I was about to be invoiced or any notification whatsoever. If I hadn’t checked my credit card bill they would have, at least initially, gotten away with it. Immediately I emailed Citysearch and told them that I knew that these were fraudulent clicks and demanded that they credit my account, or I would dispute the charges through my credit card company. I also saw when I logged in to my Citysearch account that they had canceled my account and conveniently deleted all of the “statistics” that showed the number of clicks, etc. that they were trying to charge me for. Once again I checked Google Analytics, and found nothing from Citysearch or anything that could have come from them. The total number of clicks on my website once again were nowhere near what Citysearch was charging me for.

I finally got a very unprofessional email back from a “Bruce Jones, Senior Account Exec (sic)”, which implicitly made fun of my family name (I have an unusual family name), complete with punctuation mistakes and words that were left out. Bruce informed me that I should call him to talk about my cost per click, but said nothing about my telling him that there was no way that there had been that many clicks, if any at all, from Citysearch, and that I had never been able to even find my ad on their website.

After that last email from Bruce, I followed through with my threat to dispute the charges with my credit card company, especially since the credit card bill has to be paid within a week.

A quick search on Google for “Citysearch fraud” found other stories very similar to mine:

http://aldebaranwebdesign.com/blog/my-adventure-with-city-search-pay-per-click-advertising-and-click-fraud/
http://approachingmidnight.blogspot.com/2006/11/citysearch-sucks.html
http://venturebeat.com/2007/02/28/citysearch-snaps-up-insider-pages-in-local-search-race/ (look at the comment on 11/8/07, before my comment)

and those are just what I found within the first couple of minutes of searching. I’m a licensed attorney in Oklahoma - is anyone interested in possibly starting up a class-action lawsuit against Citysearch? They cannot be allowed to get away with behavior like this, and I am sure that there are many others that don’t use visitor tracking software that have no idea that they are being scammed by Citysearch.

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