A Russian national was sentenced to 10 years in prison for his role in a large-scale fraud scheme through which he and his co-conspirators stole more than $7 million from U.S. ad publishers and ad networks from 2014 and 2018.
According to the U.S. Department of Justice, between September 2014 and December 2016, Aleksandr Zhukov operated a fraudulent advertising network named Media Methane and carried out a digital advertising fraud scheme known as “Methbot.” Zhukov together with his co-conspirators set up fake ad network, which advertisers hired to display their ads on websites.
But instead of placing ads on real publishers’ webpages, Zhukov rented more than 2,000 computer servers housed in commercial datacenters in Dallas, Texas, Amsterdam and the Netherlands and used them as bots to simulate humans viewing ads on webpages.
“Zhukov and his co-conspirators programmed the bots to load real ads on blank webpages while falsely representing that the ads were loading on real webpages, “spoofing” the domains of more than 6,000 publishers, including The New York Times, the New York Post, the New York Daily News, Newsday, and the Staten Island Advance,” the DoJ said.
The bots were also programmed to click around a screen a randomly determined number of times, simulate a mouse moving around and scrolling down a webpage, start and stop a video player midway, bypass captchas, accept cookies, and falsely appear to be signed into popular social media services such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google.
Zhukov also leased more than 765,000 IP-addresses, which he assigned to each bot and then fraudulently registered IP addresses in the names of major U.S. internet providers.
As part of the scheme, the defendant recruited programmers and others to help build the infrastructure to run the operation. Prosecutors said he referred to the recruits as “my developers” and to himself as “the king of fraud.”
According to the authorities, Zhukov kept 75% of the scheme’s proceeds for himself and pocketed more than $4.8 million from the fraud.
In addition to the 10-year prison term Zhukov was ordered to pay $3,827,493 in forfeiture.