
Killing 3ve: How The FBI And Tech Industry Took Down A Massive Ad Fraud Scheme - tysone
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/3ve-botnet-ad-fraud-fbi-takedown
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ryan-c
The actual indictment is here: [https://www.justice.gov/usao-edny/press-
release/file/1114576...](https://www.justice.gov/usao-edny/press-
release/file/1114576/download)

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alasdair_
So now that this is out in the open, Google will be issuing refunds to all
advertisers who bought fake "advertising" from them, right?

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mpeg
Fraud is priced in on the industry.

Advertisers assume a percentage of their money is going to be wasted on bots,
networks (like Google) assume they will misidentify a percentage of
impressions and have to reconciliate the numbers, but also that they'll miss
some.

It's very easy to demonise Google and think they stand to benefit from this
all, but in reality they are hurt by it as much as anyone else, and if there
was guaranteed zero fraud in their network they could raise prices and
increase profit.

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ehsankia
The fact that they put so much money and effort into unraveling this extremely
complex fraud says all that you need to know.

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nindalf
Apparently not for some people, like the current top comment.

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ehsankia
Right, my point was that no matter how hard you try, no matter what you do or
what you say, there will always be people who assume malice from it all.

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aaaaaaaaaab
I have no sympathy for the ad industry whatsoever. At this point I’m rooting
for anyone making their business model less viable.

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throwaway7312
"I have no sympathy for people who want to make a living by making things who
then rent space in existing channels to tell users said things are for sale.
At this point I'm rooting for anyone making bootstrapping and entrepreneurship
less viable."

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meowface
You're strawmanning. They were saying they have no sympathy for the ad and ad
tech industry - not that they have no sympathy for people who want to
advertise their businesses.

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Ibethewalrus
Wow, at least 2x larger than Methbot. Great article.

