Click fraud.

Trust voices that show receipts, name sources, and have something real at stake; verify everything else. Start with 1 uncomfortable fact: you can no longer assume the person, voice, video or account in front of you is real. In 2025, bots made up 53% of global web traffic. Bad bots alone: 40%. The FBI logged 22,364 complaints containing AI-related information, with $893.3 million in adjusted losses. Know the fakes. Deepfakes put words into a real person's mouth. Voice clones copy you from a tiny sample: McAfee produced an 85% match from 3 seconds of audio in 1 test. Synthetic personas create fake people with convincing profiles. Bot armies manufacture popularity. Phishing emails, scam texts and cloned calls impersonate your bank, boss or family to steal money, passwords or access. Stolen credentials are then sold across dark-web forums, encrypted channels and criminal marketplaces. Then comes the softer manipulation: AI content farms, rage bait, click fraud and token bait, AI padding that burns the credits you pay for. Not every fake steals your money. Some steal your attention. My forecast: by 2030, more than 90% of social media content is synthetic or artificially amplified. The internet becomes a hall of mirrors with a few real windows. My rule: follow the incentive, then verify the identity, source and evidence. A sponsor creates a commercial incentive. A stock position creates a financial one. A political party or ideology creates a persuasion incentive. None makes the information false. And no sponsor does not make it true. If a voice, video or message asks for money, passwords, secrecy or urgency, stop. Verify it through a second channel you already trust. I co-founded IAB Netherlands in 1997 and watched digital fraud evolve from click fraud to synthetic media. The tricks changed. The meter did not. Trust voices that show receipts, name sources, correct mistakes and have something real at stake. The independent voice with receipts is the signal.

Chatbait is the little question at the end of an AI answer, built to make you send 1 more message and pay for more tokens. Start with something everyone knows: Google search ads. An advertiser pays Google every time someone clicks the ad. That created a whole industry of fake clicks, bots and click farms clicking ads that no human ever saw, so the click gets billed anyway. That is click fraud. It costs advertisers $100 billion a year. Chatbait is the same idea with a new meter. With an AI chatbot you do not pay per click, you pay per token: every word the AI writes. So the trick is to make you write 1 more message. The little question at the end of every answer, want a shorter version, shall I turn this into a post, looks like service. It is the meter ticking. It is not the chatbot's business model. It is an extra way to earn on top of the subscription, the way click fraud was an extra layer on top of real advertising. The Atlantic coined the word chatbait in 2025. Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom called it juicing engagement, the rabbit hole social media fell into before. Chatbait is the visible half of AI token bait. The invisible half hides inside the answer itself.

Token bait is my word for the tricks an AI uses to burn your tokens. The name comes from clickbait, the media trick that baits you into a click. The mechanism comes from click fraud, the Google ads trick where bots faked the clicks and the advertiser got billed. Token bait is both: it baits you into 1 more message, and the meter bills every word. A token is every word an AI writes. Your AI subscription, ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude, gives you a monthly bundle of tokens. Every answer eats into it. Run out and you wait, or you upgrade to the next plan: like a phone plan where burning your data early forces you into the bigger bundle. Companies and developers pay the hard way: per token, on the meter, like roaming. The more the AI writes, the bigger their bill. That is the trick: burn your tokens inside the bundle as fast as possible, push you out of it, and charge you more. The preamble before the answer. The recap after it. 3 paragraphs where 1 line would do. And the 1 I suspect most, after 25 years in digital marketing: the answer that is slightly off, so you correct it, ask again, and burn the bundle again. I co-founded IAB Netherlands in 1997 and helped launch IAB UK, US and Europe. We fought click fraud from day 1. Bots faked the clicks then. Padding inflates the tokens now. Same game, new meter.