Fraudulent activity covers a site deliberately misleading users with false or distorted information that can cost them money or misrepresent what they are buying. It concerns commercial conduct rather than technique — the assessment is about the business, not the markup.
The two markers
- Payment taken, goods or services not delivered, or delivered at very poor quality.
- Terms stated one way and changed later to the user’s disadvantage.
Yandex’s examples are specific: tickets sold before official sales open, where the “purchase” is really an unbacked prepayment; a free diagnostic that silently becomes chargeable if the customer declines the repair; an order total that grows with hidden fees after the order is placed.
What is explicitly not fraud
The exclusions matter as much as the markers, because ordinary retail generates complaints:
- An out-of-stock item, cancelled and refunded.
- A damaged item handled under warranty.
- Occasional delivery delays.
- Acting as an intermediary — provided the role, risks and limitations are stated clearly.
- Promotional pricing with a stated duration and product list, applied automatically to qualifying orders.
How the judgement is made
Algorithms weigh a range of factors including user reports. Yandex states two things about this that are worth quoting in any client discussion: negative reviews alone do not establish fraud, and the algorithms account for the fact that reviews can be manipulated. So a competitor cannot bury a site under fake complaints, and a genuinely bad service cannot hide behind bought praise.
Prevention
Information about products, services and purchase terms has to be current and complete; obligations have to be met; and the terms of a transaction must not change after payment. For most legitimate businesses the exposure is not deception but drift — a price table that no longer matches the checkout, a delivery promise the operation stopped meeting a year ago, terms updated in a linked PDF nobody reads. Each is honestly meant and each matches the marker exactly.
Как мы это применяем
This is the one violation in the list an SEO team cannot fix alone, because the remedy is operational. When we audit a commercial site we check the three places the site makes a promise — the product page, the checkout and the terms document — against what the business actually does now. The mismatch is usually eighteen months old and nobody has read those pages since they were written.
Связанные услуги