Greetings,

I'm collecting information as to what's the best way to go about claiming refunds from YSM for the potential fraudulent activity caught by a 3rd party auditing services.

I would appreciate any tips, stories, or experiences you could share.

- Who do you usually eMail first?
- How do they usually respond? How do you respond?
- What do you do if they don't ackowledge the clicks as fraudulent?
- What information do they usually need in order to complete their investigation?
- What is your average success rate?

Once again, any additional information would be very, very helpful.

Best Regards,
Boris

Your Y! rep should provide you with exactly what they need to investigate fraud and process a refund. Here is what they have asked of me.

I think its best to use an XL workbook to organize your information and then send it to your Y! rep. Include:

Of course your Y! account#.
Date and time of suspicious activity.
The website where the clicks occured.
The exact keywords that were used in the queries.
An estimate of what you feel this fruad cost you.
Provide a trend of click activity to demonstrate a spike in traffic.
If you are selling widgets and have sales conversion ratios provide them.
Capture entries within your web log file.
Provide leads/form fill outs you suspect may have come from click fraud.
Provide IP addresses of suspicious clicks.

I also think a brief summary of what you think has occured might help.

The Y! rep will do an initial review of the account and pass it on to the next level of investigation. If that group sees there is suspicious activity they will do a "full" investigation. I have been told this can take up to 3 weeks. After the full investigation is complete you will be provided with their results. If a refund is warranted it will be credited to your account within 2 weeks.

A Y! rep may be able to give you a more detailed description of the actions taken and the timeframes. In the past it has been a fairly long process, and considering fraud can occur frequently advertisers could spend A LOT of their time processing/haggling for refunds. Due to this I think Y! is trying to streamline this process as much as possible.

Hope this helps

Discovery