Ad Fraud

On November 10 in 2021, Russian cybercriminal Aleksandr Zhukov was sentenced to 10 years in prison for his digital ad scam, stealing more than $7 million from U.S. advertisers and publishers for more than 2 years. How did he do it? Russian “King of Ad Fraud” Gets Caught In 2014, Zhukov started an advertising network and received payments from other ad networks to place advertisements on websites. But instead of putting ads on real web pages, he rented 2,000 computer servers and put them in data centers, programming them to act like humans viewing ads.

Over the top TV (OTT) or Connected TV (CTV) have pretty much made their mark on the advertising landscape — enough to stake their claim as a mainstay in the advertiser’s official bag of tricks! Currently, there are more than 130 CTV applications1 available to viewers, and that number is growing rapidly; like a new city popping up in the middle of the desert. But, with any new city comes new bad guys.