EDNY: RU Cybercriminal Convicted of Defrauding Millions via Digital Advertising Scheme

[Budi]

It's the "How he did it" that is chilling.
We're just a bunch of sittin' ducks
😐

From EDNY.
https://www.justice.gov/usao-edny/pr/russian-cybercriminal-convicted-defrauding-american-companies-millions-dollars-through

Department of Justice
U.S. Attorney’s Office
Eastern District of New York
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Friday, May 28, 2021
Russian Cybercriminal Convicted of Defrauding American Companies of Millions of Dollars Through Digital Advertising Scheme
Aleksandr Zhukov Boasted He Was the “King of Fraud”


SNIP
“Aleksandr Zhukov took an old-fashioned fraud into cyberspace to steal millions of dollars from unsuspecting victims.
But his guilty verdict, and the meticulous work of the prosecutors from the United States Attorney’s Office in the Eastern District of New York, highlights the vigilance of our NYPD detectives and law enforcement partners in tracking wrongdoers into the digital frontier,” stated NYPD Commissioner Shea.

The internet is, in large part, freely available to users worldwide because it runs on digital advertising: website owners display advertisements on their sites and are compensated for doing so by intermediaries representing businesses seeking to advertise their goods and services to real human customers. In general, digital advertising revenue is based on how many users click or view the ads on those websites.

As proven at trial, Zhukov used computer programming and infrastructure spread around the world to exploit the digital advertising industry through fraud.
He and his co-conspirators represented to others that they ran legitimate companies that delivered advertisements to real human internet users accessing real internet webpages.
In fact, Zhukov and his co-conspirators faked both the users and the webpages: they programmed computers they controlled to load advertisements on fabricated webpages, via an automated program, in order to fraudulently obtain digital advertising revenue. The victims included The New York Times, The New York Post, Comcast, Nestle Purina, the Texas Scottish Rite Hospital for Children, and Time Warner Cable.

The evidence at trial established that between September 2014 and December 2016, Zhukov carried out his digital advertising fraud scheme through a purported advertising network called Media Methane.
Media Methane had business arrangements with other advertising networks whereby it received payments in return for placing advertising placeholders (“ad tags”) on websites. Rather than place these ad tags on real publishers’ websites, however, Media Methane rented more than 2,000 computer servers housed in commercial datacenters in Dallas, Texas, and Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and used those datacenter servers to load ads on fabricated websites, “spoofing” more than 6,000 domains.

To create the illusion that real human internet users were viewing the advertisements loaded onto these fabricated websites, the defendants programmed the datacenter servers to simulate the internet activity of human internet users: browsing the internet through a fake browser, using a fake mouse to move around and scroll down a webpage, starting and stopping a video player midway, and falsely appearing to be signed into Facebook. Zhukov leased more than 650,000 Internet Protocol (“IP”) addresses, assigned multiple IP addresses to each datacenter server, and then fraudulently registered those IP addresses in the names of U.S. companies like Comcast and Time Warner Cable to make it appear that the datacenter servers were residential computers belonging to American internet users who were subscribed to various residential internet service providers.

In discussing the scheme with a co-conspirator, Zhukov boasted about the money he would earn and referred to himself as the “king of fraud.”
As a result of this elaborate scheme, the defendant falsified billions of ad views and caused businesses to pay more than $7 million for ads that were never actually viewed by real human internet users. Zhukov was arrested in Bulgaria in November 2018 and extradited to the United States in January 2019.

The government’s case is being handled by the Office’s National Security and Cybercrime Section.