Global Ad Fraud Discovered and Taken Down

[engine]

A global ad fraud scheme has been discovered by a team of businesses, and a 13-count indictment announced at the U.S. Department of Justice.

Also unsealed today in federal court in Brooklyn were seizure warrants authorizing the FBI to take control of 31 internet domains, and search warrants authorizing the FBI to take information from 89 computer servers, that were all part of the infrastructure for botnets engaged in digital advertising fraud activity. The FBI, working with private sector partners, redirected the internet traffic going to the domains (an action known as “sinkholing”) in order to disrupt and dismantle these botnets.

[justice.gov...]

[security.googleblog.com...]

White paper (PDF) "Taking down a major ad fraud operation through industry collaboration" [services.google.com...]

[tangor]

Back patting surely involved. :)

The web has enough fraud. Any tangible actions that reduce it are to be commended.

[cnvi]

old news... ad (click) fraud has been around since 1999 and its the primary reason we spend zero dollars on facebook and adwords.. since the majority of the ad traffic traffic is bots that spend milleseconds on the website, we've stopped advertising altogether. It's a huge waste of $. Big time illegal for G & FB to continue to allow it but thats another discussion for another time.

FB is probably worse than Google since the vast majority of their accounts are fake (sorry to use the fake word but thats what they are)...

Sure would be nice to have the Internet fuction as Tim Berners Lee intended instead of all of the malicious behaviour.

[engine]

Yes, it's been around for a long time, but, we must welcome some progress on this, and not just for the petpetrators being caught and stopped, but also for the effect on advertisers and users.

I doubt it'll ever be entirely eliminated, however, we do need more and greater efforts to stop this.

[IanTurner]

The more ad fraud is eliminated, the better it becomes for genuine publishers and for advertisers.

The scale and sophistication of this one is the really interesting thing.