He called himself the King of Fraud. Now this bot lord will reign in prison for years Aleksandr Zhukov, a Russian national and the self-proclaimed "king of fraud," this week received a 10-year prison sentence for carrying out a $7m digital ad fraud scheme. Zhukov was convicted in May of multiple counts of fraud and money laundering. He was arrested in Bulgaria in 2018 and extradited to America the following …
Reading the article I thought he was probably working for Google. /Joke
Sure, it was "fraud" but how much happens on the Internet like that all the time? He seems to have a very good understanding of internet fraud, he's been moved to America now so it might be worth giving him US citizenship and then the government employing him to manage the Internet when he's released ... I'm thinking that he probably would be able to completely eliminate Internet Fraud since he's got a deep understanding - something that the average government employee lacks.
He could easily have gone legit, but made the same money? Not so sure.
Also, it's a lot harder to get a high paid job in tech than most think. Talent is only one piece of the puzzle. A lot of the time you have to have the right paperwork too.
As probably quite a few people here can probably attest if they've ever stood in for a fired CTO...you're only good enough to make the seat safe, you probably aren't good enough to be proudly displayed on the exec team page on the website.
"Studied at Oxford and successfully steered X,Y,Z companies over a 20 year span" sounds a lot better than "Appointed at short notice because we were fucked and dug us out of the shit after our last crap CTO".
I've stepped up in loads of situations where CTOs have either been fired, they fucked off or were just incompetent and I've not yet been offered the position permanently. Granted I'm only 37 and quite baby faced so I probably don't look old enough to appear wise yet...but still.
The way I see it is there's this weird grey area when you start aging as a techie where you're too old for mid level hands on engineering roles, but too young for a senior role.
The elephant in the room is qualifications as well. I've been working in tech since I was 17, 14 if you count the tech support I was doing for small businesses, family friends and the like before that for pocket money. Experience doesn't count for shit if you don't have the right academic creds most of the time. There are exceptions, but they aren't very common.
not since my first job has anyone asked about where I went to school. Over the last 35 years I've worked for companies across the spectrum of giant tech companies to tiny startups and with every tech title from junior engineer to cto and ceo. No one cares where I went to school, only that I can do the job
From the crowd that's full on ad-blockers and exclaiming the dangers of drive by malware served over ad networks, I'm shocked there's not some level of cheerleading going on for these guys.
You need to make up your mind about whether the ad brokers are the victims or perpetrators in the bigger scheme of things. Prison time for stealing from businesses modeled on outright fraud (inflated impression counts, stalking average internet users, etc) is absurd. Clearly he didn't go far enough, because if he had, we'd be talking fines and a slap on the wrist.
I does seem like the ad business is a farce if there is no feedback in terms of increased business that customers can use positively correlated to the adds to increased profit. Without such a sanity check check how can it be determined how much ads with this or that company are worth?
Or maybe that is what happened, and all the customers did know and quit, losing a little bit each. Like a builder who takes on a lot of contracts and downpayments before word gets around that it is a scam.
Yes, it is a very unsympathetic 'victim' in this case, and it is not as though we are indirect victims either since the ad-slingers would have spaffed their advertising revenue anyway - so the additional cost on goods is a given.
Definitely a very naughty boy - and probably would have got up to less palatable no-good if these easy pickings had not been available. The sentence does have the whiff of a US "crime against corporate America" feel to it.
A lot of advertising is wasted. A company I know of was buying about £3k of google ads a month, when they checked the figures they were only selling about £2k of services that could be traced to the adverts.
For some reason they have decided to reduce the spend on online adverts….
The company does make a lot more in direct sales and contracts….
My favourite example of just how much of it is hype and bullshit is that there is an industry standard figure[1] for how much each soshal meejah "follower"[2] is worth to a company.
The reason? Proving that the lads' online bullshitting is actually of value as Yn >= X. [3]
[1] Presumably pulled out of an industry standard arsehole.
[2] Baaaaaa.
[3] Where Y is said bum-derived number, n is number of sheep and X is the advertising cost.
Sure the web page being visited makes money, but is the advertiser?
I'm sure there are ads on this page, but I never notice them. The only time I notice a web ad is when it's blocking my view of what I want to see, and then all I'm looking for is the X so that I can close it.
I'd guess that a C suite type wouldn't dare not spend tons on advertising by whatever is the accepted/fashionable means.
It's not about outcomes (for the shareholders) it's about activity. Not slinging tons of cash would be seen as dangerously complacent. Like a premiership football manager that didn't spend on new players.
Buying a new player is seen as doing something and keeps the bought footballer away from a rival team..
Advertising is seen as doing something and counters the threat from a rival company that is spending big on ads.
Exactly this. My sister is high up in a media conglomerate that has the advertising contacts for some huge car manufacturers and a number of the biggest banks.
'Just being visible' is one of the key threads in their ads. They don't particularly need to drive sales but our brains absorb patterns/colours/fonts/jingles etc. and annoyingly remember it.
The budgets her teams work with just to get the 'right shade of blue' for a certain banner is utterly sickening.
I frequently ask her how she sleeps at night knowing that she drives so much bilge into the eyes of millions. To which she usually just shrugs and goes off to get someone to redesign her kitchen in her Singapore penthouse for the 8th time this year because Miele have a new range of ovens (or something).
*sigh
Cars and banks are things that most people buy infrequently, and they represent major commitments, so it's important to get them right. When buying such a thing, name recognition is hugely important because it reassures the customer that this is a serious company that's not likely to disappear next week.
The same dynamic doesn't apply to everything, but it's an element across a surprisingly wide range.
“Sitting at his computer keyboard in Bulgaria and Russia, Zhukov boldly devised and carried out an elaborate multi-million-dollar fraud against the digital advertising industry"
The man deserves every penny he "earned". Apart from which the phrase "carried out an elaborate multi-million-dollar fraud against the digital advertising industry". to me, that means he did to them what those cunts do to us using our bought and paid for bandwidth. Talk about the kettle calling the chimney of colour, coloured...
For this (failing to use the internet commons as a doggy dumping grounds) he was extradited to the US at considerable expense, litigated at considerable expense, and will now be warehoused at considerable expense, mostly borne by US taxpayers, demonstrating who the US government is working for. In a perfect world this would fall under the category of illegal contracts that are void or unenforceable.
I want my money back.
Agreed.
I assume he didn't want to have to share the ad revenue with the real ad slinging networks (like Google) that would have been actually needed to deliver the ads to real web pages. So, the cost of renting all those servers and IP addresses must have been cheaper than the cut Google et al would have taken.
Still as @Ace2 commented, he could have made more money being legit - maybe it would have taken longer, but, at least, he wouldn't be looking at prison.
"Still as @Ace2 commented, he could have made more money being legit - maybe it would have taken longer, but, at least, he wouldn't be looking at prison."
Being legit is one thing but breaking the "#1" rule in fraud is also significant...
You must remember the rule? Don't get caught !
As several have commented: He convinced advertisers that he could get them more ad views than other, real ad-brokers. Because (they thought) they were measuring ad views rather than increased sales they were duped. In drug development the concept is often referred to as a surrogate end-point eg measuring a drug's ability to lower blood pressure but ignoring (or explaining away) the lack of improvement in death rate.
Con-artists hate being conned - it's a shame they're allowed to drag this sort of thing into law courts.
"They were trained to bypass CAPTCHA puzzles, to accept cookies, and to fake being signed-in to social media services."
If that's a definition of being "human", those bots were a lot more human than me. I block cookies and am never signed into "social meeja" so I suppose the advertisers systems must be assuming I'm a bot. I suppose from an advertising delivery perspective, that's a win a for me.
Um, it is a fact that people are a lot more bold when they have a keyboard between them and their actions.
If this Zhukov had had to enact something in real life, I think he would have been somewhat less bold.
So let's not get carried away with the rhetoric, hmm ? He found yet another way to screw people* out of their money. There's no boldness required.
* okay, there were advertisers, but that's one step above lawyers
A paid feature is something you choose to read and is a lot more targeted than adverts, you get the same in newspapers all the time as “promoted content”.
It is a way of getting a product known for a targeted audience.
If there was a paid feature for chopsticks then on the register it probably wouldn’t get a good response, however a paid feature on choosing the best server will probably get the server admins and purchasers reading - they might not buy a Dell server but will have a better idea of the Dell model range (as there is a Dell feature on the front page when I wrote this).
Even if you have an add blocker on as it is a native article it will still get through, as long as they declare it is so then all Is good.
“Sitting at his computer keyboard in Bulgaria and Russia, Zhukov boldly devised and carried out an elaborate multi-million-dollar fraud against the digital advertising industry"
How about going after the other multi-gagillion dollar scheme called targeted advertising? Advertisers spending more to have ads shown to specific targets but the result is no measurable increase in business. Sounds fraudulent doesn't it? Lock up those selling targeted ads. Oh, and you might consider additional penalties for violations of privacy to create the whole targeted ad business.
Alas, never gonna happen. Targeted ad industry knows which wheels to grease.
Some kinds of advertising does seem (sadly) to work.Especially since people started buying more online.
Brand name recognition does get people to pay significant sums of cash for expensive scent and trainers etc. when exactly the same stuff (tat?) can be produced in exactly the same (Chinese?) factories without the name on it and would sell for pennies.
People approach various online aggregation, comparison and retail sites because they are seen on TV and the name becomes a cue when they want to buy stuff,
And then there's gambling sites, advertising on TV - often starting with Bingo as a hook......
Regarding gambling sites advertising on tv, a few months ago watching catchup on yesterday (tv channel) us usually bangers and cash - you would get every advert break online gambling adverts usually sky betting but not just them.
Don’t know if they thought watching an auction program made you want to gamble more? But buying a vehicle at auction is very different to gambling in my opinion
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