<story><title>Two Cybercrime Rings and Eight Defendants Indicted for Digital Advertising Fraud</title><url>https://www.justice.gov/usao-edny/pr/two-international-cybercriminal-rings-dismantled-and-eight-defendants-indicted-causing</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jcampbell1</author><text>The interesting thing about ad fraud is the people that lose have no ability to police the problem.  Ad networks get paid for fraud.  Intelligent ad buyers that use cost-per-acquisition targeting, don&amp;#x27;t care because they just bid lower if the traffic is a mix of fraud.&lt;p&gt;The losers are unsophisticated ad buyers such as the brand advertisers that use ad agencies to fill their ads with garbage traffic.  Proctor and Gamble has recently figured that internet display is pretty much worthless.  The other losers are legit publishers.  I am perfectly happy to pay $0.50 a click with half the traffic being fraud, as I am willing to pay $1.00 a click for legit traffic from legit publishers.  I get the same result, buy my money gets split 50&amp;#x2F;50 between legit publishers and crooks.&lt;p&gt;I am mostly a dev, but have bought more than $1M in advertising on multiple platforms.  The biggest joke I have ever seen was AppNexus.  It was like 70% or more fraud, and it was the most obvious crap imaginable.  For instance, all clicks coming from 8 month old user agents for evergreen browsers.&lt;p&gt;Google Adwords and Double Click have been mostly clean.  I&amp;#x27;d say 85-90%.  I do see stuff that is obvious bullshit from time to time, and it goes away pretty quickly and but Google doesn&amp;#x27;t refund the money.  I don&amp;#x27;t really care... they make it so we can police it pretty well.  Facebook ads are completely clean, but they don&amp;#x27;t run a network.&lt;p&gt;The simple rule for picking a ad platform is: if it isn&amp;#x27;t loaded with performance advertisers (CPA), then stay the hell away.</text></comment>
<story><title>Two Cybercrime Rings and Eight Defendants Indicted for Digital Advertising Fraud</title><url>https://www.justice.gov/usao-edny/pr/two-international-cybercriminal-rings-dismantled-and-eight-defendants-indicted-causing</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>cal5k</author><text>The most interesting part for me:
&amp;quot;Furthermore, the defendants leased more than 650,000 Internet Protocol (“IP”) addresses, assigned multiple IP addresses to each datacenter server, and then fraudulently registered those IP addresses to make it appear that that the datacenter servers were residential computers belonging to individual human internet users who were subscribed to various residential internet service providers.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s... really smart. A lot of companies use services like MaxMind to do this. I wonder how difficult it is to get a GeoIP data correction request approved:
&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;support.maxmind.com&amp;#x2F;geoip-data-correction-request&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;support.maxmind.com&amp;#x2F;geoip-data-correction-request&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>