The Vanishing Click-Fraud Case

Billosaur writes: "BusinessWeek has an interesting article on what they term The Mystery of the Vanishing Click-Fraud Case. Apparently, back in 2004, a man by the name of Michael Anthony Bradley arrived at Google's HQ for a meeting with Google engineers, to show them software he had designed to generate false clicks on Google ads. According to the indictment brought against him by the U.S. District Court in San Jose, "Bradley claimed his program could force Google to pay millions of dollars on false clicks and threatened to release it to others unless Google paid him approximately $150,000." Flash forward to Nov 22nd, 2006, and the charges against Bradley are dropped. Why? According to the article, it may have had to do with Google being unwilling to cooperate with prosecutors, which would have meant exposing how they go about dealing with click fraud."