Microsoft on Monday filed its first lawsuit over click fraud via a civil complaint (PDF) in the US District Court in Seattle. Click fraud occurs when people manipulate clicks on an online advertisement, either with an automated script or a computer program, by clicking on an ad for the purpose of generating a fraudulent “charge-per-click.” The suit (Microsoft v. Lam, case number 09-cv-0815) is asking for at least $750,000 in damages from Eric Lam, Gordon Lam, and Melanie Suen, of Vancouver, BC, Canada. The software giant claims the trio breached an adCenter contract, according to the Microsoft on the Issues blog:

In this case, as our complaint alleges, Microsoft gathered substantial evidence that a handful of individuals were likely responsible for these click fraud attacks, which affected online advertisements related to auto insurance and the online role playing game, World of Warcraft. Once we became aware of the click fraud attacks we quickly took action to address any impact on advertisers and to enhance safeguards to further protect our network. Today’s suit seeks an injunction to help stop this activity and to recover damages.

In March 2008, Microsoft received complaints from several auto insurance advertisers that traffic to their ads was suspiciously high, and the company decided to look into the issue.It became clear that searches for auto insurance keywords had sharply increased, clicks to the advertisers appearing at the top of the paid-search results listings were very high, and bizarrely, advertisements for World of Warcraft were following the same pattern.

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