It's not actual fraud. You're not bound by the terms of service of ad providers. Your device is actually sending requests to the ads, which they are counting themselves to determine payment rates. If it's fraud to send ad impressions to sites I like without visiting them, it could be fraud to deny ad impressions to sites that I do visit (with my ad blocker on.)

If the sites set it up themselves, it's fraud. If you conspire with the sites to set it up, it's fraud and conspiracy to commit fraud. But if I'm prosecuted for the crime of not actually looking at ads I request, that's just a judge with an agenda. Whether it went one way or another at every layer of appeal would probably be a coin flip, though.

Fraud would involve financially benefiting from it - if you don't benefit I don't think it would count as fraud in most countries.

In England and Wales, all three types of fraud covered by the 2006 Act have as substantive elements of the offence a requirement that a defendant intends to either "make a gain for himself or another" or "cause loss to another or to expose another to a risk of loss", where gain and loss are defined as only referring to "money or other property".

Note also that the offence is framed in terms of intention to gain or cause loss. Even if no material gain or loss happens, the intention is what matters. (The equivalent mental element for theft in England is that one dishonestly intends to permanently deprive someone of the property being taken.)

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2006/35

This applies to online ad 'click fraud' in both ways—if a publisher fraudulently clicks on adverts to make money, that'd potentially be fraud to make a gain for themselves. If a competitor clicks on adverts to get their competitor to lose money on pay-per-click, that'd potentially be fraud to cause a loss to another.

I can't speak for jurisdictions other than England and Wales but I'd be surprised if a fair number of other jurisdictions didn't also define fraud in a way that covers both gain and loss scenarios.

Where did you get this notion from? That’s absolutely not true, and there are many acts that can be illegal without benefitting from them.

I don’t think AdNauseum users would be prosecuted, but you’re still wrong.

source - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraud

lots of acts can be illegal, but that does not make them fraud.

You may want to read the CFAA and report back.

Spoiler alert, it doesn’t involve your intentions or money.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act

We are talking about general fraud, not CFAA, which is a 'hacking' law.

The companies spying on me should be the first in line to be tried under CFAA

Agree. I'm genuinely want to click every ad I see to protect myself from being tracked. If that could be fraud, will there be anything not a fraud?

I think it is just a matter of semantics. Let's call it "large scale AdWords statistics improvement". Look, sounds much better now!

Correct, fraud isn’t the correct term here. The op grabbed the first word that probably presented itself, and others nearly ad nauseam (lowercase) have discussed its merits as the term.

What’s needed is a better term.

I propose either AdTurfing (hat tip AstroTurfing) or AdLighting (hat tip GasLighting). My personal preference is the second.

Isn't it just vandalism?

Vandalism is, again a crime against property that is legitimately placed on the street or somewhere.

Ad biz is a business model, not property, and a predatory one as that. You are not obligated to enable someone else's business for free.

They are claiming their clicks and impressions mean something - its their problem to ensure they are accurate.

Imagine someone is doing a survey of sex habbits, and selling the results. Is it a fraud to lie? Ofcourse not, why should you be responsible for their profits.

The fact that people think they are legally obligated to enable this is really fucked up.

While legally we are probably far away from this being a fraud, nothing stops google from adding something to their TOS and banning your account on that basis... This is the only reason I'm not using those noise generators even though all ad-tech should burn in a trashcan fire in my opinion.