The “Checkmate Strategic Group, Inc.” of Florida has been sending me notices about why I should jump on the click fraud bandwagon and help them sue Yahoo! as part of their class action Yahoo! lawsuit because I have bought Pay Per Click ads over the years, and as everybody knows some of that money went to pay fraudsters.
With a name like “Checkmate Strategy Group” they must be good – or at least be good marketers, since I think the main goal on these suits is to pay out some pittance to the class masses and land several million for the firm. Hey, you can trust those “Checkmate Strategy Group” guys in a way you would not trust “Vegas Craig’s $2 legal opinions dot com”. Sorry, no offense to Vegas Craig.
Ha – it’s sort of like PPC in reverse where Yahoo will lose or settle and “return”, say, five hundred million nickels and dimes and quarters to hundreds of thousands of advertisers in the form of $100 here and $1000 there, while the CheckMate Group gets to keep 100 million nickels and dimes and quarters which is a LOT of cold, hard cash. 100 million dimes is ten million dollars – I bet that sure beats ambulance chasing.
As much as I like retribution for the shameful lack of oversight on the part of Search Engines since PPC ads took off, I think Google rather than Yahoo’s been the overwhelming beneficiary of all those ill gotten fraudulent PPC gains in the form of a clicked nickel here and a dime there. They got off easy with a recent $90 million settlement.
So, on second thought maybe I won’t sue Yahoo! cuz I like those guys. They are doing great 2.0 stuff all over the place and opening up data and maps and cool stuff.
On the other hand I sure could use a few of those shiny nickels back ….
Joe Duck 
I have also been invited to join the action against Yahoo…. But like you have decided to pass. Why? The same reason you gave. It appears a huge sum of money will be paid to ‘Checkmate’ and those that actually lost money through the fraud itself will have to fight over the scraps! It is tempting to join the action and recover anything possible but in return for a measly payout you loose your rights to pursue any action against Yahoo in the future. Who is to say a non-profit organization may take up the cause in the future?
What I’d like to see, though I’m not holding my breath, would be for Yahoo and Google to be more proactive by cutting out the big legal firms and setting up something where they refund more than can reasonably be expected from a class action in exchange for an agreement that this finishes their obligations. They won’t do this because it’s cheaper for them to simply fight the lawsuits and wear them down to lower amounts, but it would be better for their customers.