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Click fraud is not a crime in the U.S. It may be a breach of the site/service's contract with its advertisers, but it is not a crime. Whistleblowing laws only
by rprasad 14y ago
Click fraud is not a crime in the U.S. It may be a breach of the site/service's contract with its advertisers, but it is not a crime.
Whistleblowing laws only protect reporting crimes or regulatory violations. Ergo, they would not apply in this case.
For this reason, NDAs are permissible. Note that if the friend was actually working for an advertiser, the NDA would be limited (but would stilly generally apply), because the aforementioned breach of contract would empower the advertiser to sue.
- downandout 14y agoUS Fraud statutes are VERY broadly written. In this case, each time they knowingly dropped an inflated bill in the mail, that was a new count of mail fraud. If they emailed the bills, it was wire fraud. More traditional click fraud, where the the clicks are inflated with bots or even other humans at the direction of the person benefiting from them would fall under the wire fraud statutes, assuming that somewhere in the contract between the parties it states that you will not take any action to inflate your clicks. The breach of that contract becomes criminally fraudulent because they are paying you based upon a misrepresentation by you - namely that you have stated that you won't do such things.