Security News > 2021 > November > Russian 'King of Fraud' sentenced to 10 years for Methbot scheme
The U.S. Department of Justice sentenced a Russian man for operating a large-scale digital advertising fraud scheme called 'Methbot' that stole at least $7 million from American companies.
Aleksandr Zhukov, aka the "King of Fraud," was sentenced to 10 years of imprisonment in the U.S. and ordered to forfeit the total sum of his assets, amounting to $3,827,493.
"To create the illusion that human internet users were viewing the advertisements loaded onto these spoofed webpages, Zhukov and his co-conspirators programmed the bots to appear and behave like human internet users." Reads the U.S. DoJ announcement.
Advertisers paid Zhukov large sums to drive their online marketing campaigns, and the fraudster did so on cloned, spoofed sites.
None of the ads that companies paid Zhukov to run were ever displayed on real sites, and none of them were ever seen by human internet users.
Zhukov's only expense for running this fraud operation was the 25% cut of his co-conspirators, the programmer salaries, and the renting costs of 2,000 servers located in the U.S. Correction 11/11/21: Zhukov was not involved in the 3ve fraud campaign that used a malware botnet.