9th Methbot suspect arrested in massive clickfraud ring

2020-01-24 10:57

New York police have arrested yet another man suspected of running the clickfraud factory known as Methbot: a farm of 1,900 data servers rented to host 5,000 bogus websites and to concoct fictional traffic coming from fake visitors, thereby running up profits from advertising fraud.

As the affidavit describes, between September 2014 and December 2016, Denisoff's alleged part was to operate an advertising network that purported to place ads on real webpages seen by real, human visitors.

The Methbot operators ran what they claimed to be an advertising network which they dubbed Mediamethane.

Denisoff allegedly supplied the Methbot crew with fake domains and helped them slip past fraud-detection security software.

Well, so much for the plan to go covert: after the FBI arrested Zhukov, during a raid in Bulgaria in November 2018, investigators found multiple Jabber conversations on Zhukov's computer, dating back years, including with Denisoff.

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https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2020/01/24/9th-methbot-suspect-arrested-in-massive-clickfraud-ring/