What to do against competitor PPC sabotage?

[DemiGR]

This morning a competitor of ours decided to go on a PPC rampage against us.  Basically our budgeting money was spent within the first hour of going live on bing.  Its pretty obvious whats going on as we had a tremendous amount of clicks all from the exact same keyword within a short period of time.

Obviously first step was to contact bing and they are going to refund me a credit once they go through their process, but they didnt really give me confidence about the future.  It seems they may not be able to prevent this from continually happening.. ?

The attacker used some sort of IP spoofing as the clicks were all from different IP's which is probably why it snuck pasted Bing.  Wondering what have you guys done in the past to prevent this or combat it?

Thankfully it didnt happen on google

[jesse-landry]

Ugh. I'm sorry to hear this.

I'm disheartened by the amount of people on these forums being attacked by competitors with bad backlinks and fraudulent PPC charges. Is this really the direction businesses are going in the online marketing world?

Sad...

Sorry I have no suggestions. Except maybe to have faith in karma?

[DemiGR]

Yea I agree with you, if this is how you try to compete then its shows a huge flaw in your business practices.  Regardless, I have to try and see how to prevent this in the future as BING was unable to prevent it.  Would appreciate feedback anyone can offer!

[PremioOscar]

I agree with Jesse,

This is sad and it shows you how many people can only use this techniques in order to overpower competitors, instead of working their a***s off in order to achieve good results.

I feel sorry for them, but on the other side, if I were you I would be happy, because you are doing a good job with your campaign that this competitor can't really compete with.

I don't think you can really prevent this, instead notify bing and if you know exactly which company has done it to you, you might report them.

[JasmineA]

That really sucks. I'm sorry to hear that this happened to you. I don't think there's anything you can do against this, but I do have a few questions just to get a better understanding of what was going on, if you don't mind sharing.

How much was your budget?
For what match type?
What was your CPC? 
What location were you targeting? 
What niche are you in?