
Myspace looked like it was back, but was a pawn in an ad fraud scheme - Sujan
https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/remember-tom?utm_term=.uajQ9V5yA#.hnRwoK71M
======
jack9
Viant (aka Specific Media) is a well known fraudster. Nobody in the ad
industry thought MySpace was "back" after you heard who bought it years ago.
The Vanderhooks (the brothers who founded Specific and continue to run all
their schemes) pioneered the pop-under and have been running darker scams ever
since. I worked for Specific for a few years and the brothers were
refreshingly tech savvy. The penchant for fraud was always the dominant
strategy (grown from a kernel of organic, like all good ad fraud).

~~~
mratzloff
Why did you work for them for a few years if they were engaging in fraud?

~~~
kaishiro
These things are rarely gone over in the initial ramp up in my experience :)

It usually takes some time to see what the actual core values of an
organization are.

~~~
mratzloff
Not years

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Sujan
Another article about this kind of click fraud. And again only lots of details
where the traffic goes and how it is then used to "spam" impressions on ads.

Does anyone understand what devices/users are actually going into this
"funnel" and where they come from? Botnet? Junk traffic from porn sites?
Iframes?

~~~
sogen
[http://money.cnn.com/2016/12/20/technology/ad-fraud-
online-m...](http://money.cnn.com/2016/12/20/technology/ad-fraud-online-
methbot/index.html)

~~~
pault
Damn, $5MM a day. Even if your network gets broken up after a few weeks that's
still a massive win.

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urlgrey
Crawlers & bots trigger video playback on the websites they visit, though it's
probably unintentional in most cases. At Mux we have taken steps to identify
such video views to limit their impact on aggregate video view performance
metrics: [https://mux.com/blog/do-androids-watch-videos-of-electric-
sh...](https://mux.com/blog/do-androids-watch-videos-of-electric-sheep-how-
bots-react-to-web-video-2/)

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scientistem
This is certainly click fraud. Is that fraud in the legal sense?

~~~
AlexCoventry
If it can be demonstrated that your'e intentionally and knowingly deceiving
someone in order to separate them from their money, it's fraud.

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diogenescynic
Facebook is probably also juking their stats. I don’t trust any of their
numbers.

~~~
nemothekid
Does it matter? Their effectiveness is proven at this point.

~~~
gotrecruit
When have they proven the effectiveness of their ads? From my understanding,
in fact it is increasingly being discovered that much of their clicks and
likes, etc are fake.

