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Citysearch Click Fraud Warning

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.

This entry was posted on December 4, 2007 at 16:40 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

11 Responses to “Citysearch Click Fraud Warning”

  1. James Reid says:
    January 25, 2008 at 03:58

    Hello,

    I just read your post and I am very interested in taking legal action against Citysearch. We started out with Citysearch in 2001 (paying $1 per click) and have had quite a few problems with them, including sales rep indescrepancies and unfair sales practices. When I told the sales rep at one of our initial meetings about our concern about not climbing up in the ranks and not receiving inquiries, he said not to worry because he, and others, would keep track of the clicks; and if the clicks were low, he and others would help out by clicking on our listing to increase the number of clicks we received and, thus, increase our ranking. I didn’t like this approach and voiced my concern via emails and telephone calls. I have copies (somewhere in my older email database backups) of letters I have sent them regarding fraudulent practices and unfair pricing. Shortly afterwards, our initial sales rep was either let go or transferred.

    One of my other complaints, at the time, was I wasn’t getting any tracking logs that I was told I could get. I told them that the amount of clicks I was charged for and the traffic reports I was (and still am) receiving from wundercounter.com didn’t add up. I never did receive any reports or logs from Citysearch.

    I also told them I was not happy with the $1 dollar per click rate, especially because I had heard that others were paying below that rate. As a result from discussions with sales reps and regional execs, our rate was decreased to 35 cents per click about 4 years ago.

    Recently, our rates were raised to $1 per click. Again, I expressed that the traffic reports I was getting didn’t come close to matching with their figures; and that if they insisted on raising my rates, I would have to decrease my budget ceiling. During that time, I did some research and discovered that Citysearch places customer listings in other cities way outside of their area to get more clicks. I did a search on our site name, moonshadowmassage.com, and discovered we were being listed in many other Citysearch directory cities, including San Francisco and Chicago. Since then, I have reduced my budget and have asked to be advertised locally, only. I have also asked for tracking logs, and have not been given them.

    Please let me know if you decide to go through with this. Thank you.

    James C. Reid

  2. Becky Crabb says:
    April 1, 2008 at 12:48

    Hello,

    to all of my new taken atvantage of buddies!I am so mad and I have a really good story against City Search! Its late and I dont really feel like getting in detail tonight.F.Y.I my moyher is an attorney and a mean one here in Dallas Texas. She dosent really pay much attention to my complaints but with all of us pulling together I know we have a case against City Search and I am sure there are many more. Send me an email or a call 214-552-1408

  3. admin says:
    April 2, 2008 at 14:14

    So nice to hear from other people that have been scammed by Citysearch so that I know I am not just missing something here. And to update the situation, not only did Citysearch never respond to my complaints, they turned my account over to a collection agency and are trying to charge me an additional $25 collection fee! I had pretty much decided to just forget about them, since my credit card company had decided the dispute in my favor, but now that Citysearch has turned my business over to a collection agency, there may be damages to collect….I have written back to the collection agency and explained the situation, but if Citysearch continues to try to collect on this fraudulent debt then I will have no choice but to file a lawsuit against them, and it is just as easy to file a lawsuit with multiple plaintiffs as with only one. I would love to hear from more people who have been defrauded by Citysearch or any of the IAC companies like Ask.com, etc.

  4. mark says:
    May 17, 2008 at 17:25

    Hi,
    I was just scammed by citysearch.
    So let’s band together to bring them down.
    What’s the next step?

    Mark

  5. admin says:
    May 17, 2008 at 17:56

    Very nice to hear from you Mark. I’ve talked with Becky, and her mother is an attorney and may be interested in pursuing this. If we get something going I will be sure and contact you. To further update my situation, the collection agency that Citysearch turned my account over to was extremely nice once I explained the situation to them, and immediately closed the collection account and apologized. The very next day, Citysearch AGAIN charged my credit card for $107, once again committing fraud as those charges were completely unauthorized. I called my credit card company, and they said that I could dispute the charges again but there would be nothing that they could do to keep Citysearch from charging my card again, so they recommended that I cancel my credit card and they would give me a new card with a new number. So I had to go to all of my different accounts that were automatically billed to that credit card and change the billing to a new credit card, all because Citysearch could not be trusted to stop billing my previous credit card. It is absolutely ridiculous and incredible that a supposedly legitimate company like Citysearch would attempt to conduct business in this manner.

  6. CJ Cantrell says:
    September 19, 2008 at 03:14

    After going through something similar, and even having my account illegally re-opened after canceling it, I was looking into a possible law suit against Citysearch. I had documentation of their daily clicks (sometimes 0 and the very next day 250!) but still not enough to pursue a lawsuit.

    However, after speaking to an attorney today to find out what more proof I needed, I began doing more research. Turns out, there has been a class action law suit filed recently against Citysearch.

    Below you will find a link to one of the articles that I found, but all you really have to do is go into google and look up “citysearch fraud” and you’ll see all kinds of stuff written about this.

    http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2008/05/citysearchcom-accused-of-encouraging-click-fraud.html

    Feel free to contact me and I’d be more than happy to share more information about what I have found, and how you can find this information about your own account with them so that you may also be able to pursue further legal action.

    They’ve almost put me out of business, and I’m still not quite sure how I’m going to recover. I want to make sure that they won’t be able to do this to another small business.

  7. admin says:
    September 19, 2008 at 11:11

    Thank you very much for that comment and the link. It is good to know that someone is going after Citysearch. I am still fighting them - even after canceling my Chase credit card to keep them from continuing to charge me for those fraudulent clicks, they managed to get Chase to charge me on my new credit card number, and now I am also having to fight with Chase about these fraudulent charges. After hearing your story and those of others, I feel fortunate that I haven’t been defrauded of more money, but that doesn’t lessen the culpability of Citysearch for outright fraud. I’m going to contact the law firm that has filed the class action suit against Citysearch, Kabateck Brown Kellner, just to see if there is anything that I can do to help. I may also file a lawsuit against Citysearch when I go back to the USA in December. It will cost me more to file the lawsuit than if I actually just paid Citysearch, but this is no longer about the money. It is about what Citysearch is doing to small businesses like yours and mine. It is incredible that they can get away with this and continue to basically rape anyone that is unfortunate enough to sign up with them.

  8. Rick says:
    January 17, 2009 at 11:41

    All the negatives about Citysearch noted above are dead on the money. I too have been victimized by Citysearch. They have billed my credit card over $500 per month for five months. The rep who signed us up said the billing to our account would be 12.95 and he doubted that the billing would go over $20 in any given month. I am trying to work thru my credit card company and may get some relief there but it will only be partially. I have done alot of reading from others who have suffered the bad Citysearch experience. I would be remiss if I did not say BEWARE (ESPECIALLY SMALL COMPANIES LIKE MINE) IT IS VERY DOUBTFUL THIS COMPANY WILL EVER BE A POSITIVE ADVERTISER FOR YOUR COMPANY GIVEN THEIR CURRENT PRACTICES AND MY OWN PERSONAL EXPERIENCES WITH THEM.

  9. Sully says:
    March 27, 2009 at 14:23

    Before I tell my experience, I printed out all of my supposed click data from Citysearch so I have evidence to show their reported abnormal and seemingly fraudulent click traffic. Also, I have Google Analytics and StatCounter.com evidence to show that I received no traffic from my Citysearch profile page, despite the reported several hundred clicks.

    I had an experience with Citysearch eerily similar to yours. My account had no activity for nearly three weeks, but after inquiring about clearing up the term “connection” (I thought it meant click throughs, I was wrong), my account showed an abnormal increase in activity between the time I asked the question and the end of my billing period, which also mysteriously maxed out my budget the DAY my billing period ended. My service continued for another month despite my demand for cancellation, and AGAIN the clicks maxed my budget on the DAY my billing period ended. This appears so obviously fraudulent I am baffled how this service can exist.

    I have a detailed write up of the experience that I sent to my state\’s attorney general, as well as Google Analytics data, and a copy of the Citysearch click charges. I can email it to you if it will help with taking some legal action. msully725 (at) g m a i l . c o m

  10. admin says:
    March 28, 2009 at 15:11

    Hey Sully,
    Thanks for taking the time to write about your experiences. It just amazes me that Citysearch continues to get away with stealing money from people. As an update to what happened with me, my credit card company sent me a notice that those charges that Citysearch had continuously fraudulently tried to charge me for (even though I changed my credit card number at the recommendation of my credit card company) had been confirmed! Obviously Citysearch had just showed my credit card company the initial contract that I had agreed to, before I learned of their fraudulent practices. Once I told my credit card company (for about the 10th time) what had happened and that Citysearch had billed me for clicks that never occurred, my credit card company credited me for the amount that Citysearch had charged me. What I am afraid of is that my credit card company actually paid Citysearch and just decided to write off the loss when I threatened to include them in any lawsuit if they (the credit card company) tried to make me pay for those obviously fraudulent clicks. It is just unbelievable that Citysearch can continue to operate this way and get away with it. I would be willing to submit a signed and sworn affidavit to anyone that pursues a lawsuit against Citysearch, but I don’t have the time to go after them on my own.

  11. CP Atlanta says:
    April 25, 2009 at 05:19

    Yes, I am very interested in a lawsuit against Citysearch. I have had a similar experience to others expressed here and been victim of their highly unprofessional employees. I have contacted my attorney to proceed with some action against them.

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