The US Department of Justice (DOJ) has convicted a Russian man for operating a large-scale digital ad fraud scheme called “Methbot” (“3ve”) that stole at least $7 million from American companies.
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Aleksandr Zhukov, also known as the "King of Fraud", was sentenced to 10 years in prison in the US and ordered to pay the total amount of his assets, amounting to $3,827,493, as a fine.
That's about a million dollars less than what the fraudster earned from the scam, with the remaining 25% going to his associates.
Zhukov was arrested in Bulgaria in 2018 and extradited to the United States the following year.
The man was convicted of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, wire fraud, money laundering, and conspiracy to commit money laundering in May 2021.
The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York announced the sentence and also said he will have to spend another seven years in prison.
Zhukov and his collaborators created a massive botnet called “Methbot,” also known as “3ve,” which consisted of at least 700,000 active infections running a thousand data center nodes and using 750,000 IP addresses.
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These bots generated fake traffic to websites between September 2014 and December 2016, thereby creating false impressions on ads.
Advertisers paid Zhukov large sums to drive their online marketing campaigns, and the fraudster did so on cloned, spoofed websites.
In total, the scammer is believed to have misled at least 6,000 websites, including those of The New York Times and the New York Post.
None of the ads that companies paid Zhukov to run ever appeared on real websites, and none of them were ever viewed by human internet users.
Zhukov's only cost for running this business was the 25% fees he paid to his partners, the salaries of the programmers, and the cost of renting 2,000 servers located in the US.
Information source: bleepingcomputer.com
