Security News > 2022 > May > US recovers $15 million from global Kovter ad fraud operation
The US government has recovered over $15 million from Swiss bank accounts belonging to operators behind the '3ve' online advertising fraud scheme.
84 to the US government as part of a Final Order of Forfeiture related to United States v. Sergey Ovsyannikov, one of the conspirators in the global ad fraud campaign.
In 2018, the Department of Justice announced an indictment against Aleksandr Zhukov, Boris Timokhin, Mikhail Andreev, Denis Avdeev, Dmitry Novikov, Sergey Ovsyannikov, Aleksandr Isaev, and Yevgeniy Timchenko for their involvement in the 3ve ad fraud botnet.
At its peak, the 3ve ad fraud campaign, also known as Eve, infected over 1.7 million devices with the Kovter botnet, a click-fraud malware that would quietly run in the background while connecting to sites to consume advertisements.
From December 2015 through October 2018, the operation fraudulently billed advertisers over $29 million for ads that real visitors never saw.
At its peak, the criminal operation generated between 3 and 12 billion daily ad bid requests every day.