Potential Pay per click fraud issues effecting all

Browsers such as firefox are becoming more and more popular

But this raises an important fraud issue on your PPC programs

You see these browsers support "prefetch"

This is where a browser is instructed to get the next page in a website

the idea is to make the website appear more responsive

The downside is the site owner has NO CONTROL over this

so a PPC publisher could easily set up their website to include prefetching of a PPC ad

The user never actually gets sees the advertisers page, but from the advertisers point of view it was seen.

As an advertiser you have no comeback your logs show a legitimate hit, and no anti fraud mechanism can tell the difference.

Firefox will not prefetch a site with parameters ie ?ppc=google etc..
but not all advertisers use parameters.

While firefox is only a small percentage of the userbase, it is growing significantly. and has already become a worthwhile target for click fraud.

I don't see this at all with the lastest version of FF (1.0.4).

i just browsed one of my sites, and I saw no requests for other pages, aside from the page being called.

I am curious, if pre-fetch worked the way you describe, this means FF would have to "spider" every link on every page. This does not seem likely or plausible. Can I get some more info?