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Microsoft suing trio over fraud crimes

Published on 17 Jun 2009 under category: legal

Microsoft is suing three people over allegations of fraud crimes.

The IT giant is taking the action in relation to individuals manipulating online click searches to give themselves better search-engine rankings.

Damages of $750,000 (£456,000) are being sought by the firm.

The defendants, Gordan Lam, Eric Lam and Melanie Suen, are accused of fraud crimes which involved generating clicks on advertisements for websites, which in turn increased the charges that the firms had to pay for these adverts.

Microsoft commented that as well as disrupting their competitor's campaigns, the trio had "obtained increased user traffic for their own ads at a much lower cost than they could have otherwise".

The IT giant revealed that by its calculations the defendants made around $250,000 from these fraud crimes.

In other news involving fraud crimes, earlier this week it was revealed that some of the victims of the Ponzi pyramid scheme have written to the judge in the case asking for a harsh sentence for Bernard Madoff.