A look at the fake online traffic business, as some ad exchanges look the other way and advertisers are embarrassed to admit they purchased fraudulent inventory
Botmasters have created a Kafkaesque system where companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots. And everyone is fine with this.
Big things that goes unmentioned: antifraud tech has no incentive to work because they use buyer leverage to shake down publishers and SSPs, which means they get paid by buyer and seller AND middlemen and as a result are incentivized not to work properly (and mostly don't)...
ALEKSANDR ZHUKOV ...accused of defrauding US companies ... out of millions of dollars...set up a company that promised to show online adverts to humans, but he instead placed those ads on an elaborate network of fake websites where they were seen only by bots https://www.wired.co…