Estimates are that more than $7 billion a year is lost to fraudulent traffic and bogus clicks.
In what appears to be the largest digital advertising scam in history, a group of Russian hackers reportedly built a click-fraud machine that stole up to $5 million daily from top advertisers and publishers. But even that is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to online ad fraud.
Estimates are that billions of dollars are lost annually because of fraudulent clicks, fake traffic, and other scams. But because of the way the online-advertising market is structured, with several layers of middlemen and ad networks, there is little incentive to stop it.
In fact, the rise of sophisticated bot-nets and other forms of click fraud is part of the reason why less than half of all Internet ads are even seen by humans, according to a study done by online analytics firm comScore in 2013.
The latest scam involved a network of computers that pretended to be human web surfers so they could generate fake traffic to bogus websites and report fake clicks. It was discovered by a security firm called White Ops, which dubbed the “bot-net” operation Methbot, after a code word found in the program the hackers used to operate the network.
According to White Ops, the combined financial impact of the fraud was several times larger than the largest previous “bot-net,” known as ZeroAccess, which was uncovered in 2011. The security firm estimated the hackers generated $3 million to $5 million daily in revenue……READ MORE at: Original Article: fortune.com
