More to the Facebook click fraud story that we wrote about earlier this week has surfaced on TechCrunch.

When the first story broke, many people were wondering why Facebook would have such an issue- unlike the Google Adsense program, which shares revenue with a network of publishers who have great incentives to click their own ads, Facebook ads are only on Facebook. However, it now appears that a financial incentive does exist, it is just a bit more indirect.

Much of the fraud, it seems, is being perpetrated by advertisers against their competitors. Nefarious advertisers are using software to generate fraudulent clicks on competitor’s ads using large sets of falsified Facebook accounts. The idea is to reduce the level of competition by driving up the costs, reducing ROI, and causing some advertisers to pull their ads. This is not entirely surprising given that a large portion of Facebook’s ads are purchased by affiliate marketers, a group that has long sported a dark underbelly.

Facebook says that the fraud is back under control. While they are employing a variety of techniques to detect and filter fraudulent clicks, they are not cancelling the fake accounts, since that would only result in the creation of new accounts and give rise to new techniques. Advertisers who have been affected should be issued credits automatically. Of course, some advertisers report that they are still having problems, which means that Facebook still has some work to do. Though discrepencies will always exist between ad clicks and site visits (for a variety of reasons), we are glad to see that Facebook is taking this issue seriously.