A W5H Exploration of Ad Fraud
In 2016, a cybersecurity firm known as White Ops uncovered a sophisticated and incredibly lucrative advertising fraud ring that was generating up to $5 million per day in revenue by targeting the premium ad ecosystem. The ‘bot farm,’ identified as MethBot was a collective of hackers that were falsifying IP addresses to imitate human activity and artificially inflating online video views, in some cases up to 300 million views per day.
