Select All: Max Read

How Much of the Internet Is Fake? Turns out, a lot of it, actually.

- Max Read

In late November, the Justice Department unsealed indictments against eight people accused of fleecing advertisers of $36 million in two of the largest digital ad-fraud operations ever uncovered. Fraudsters had essentially created a simulacrum of the internet where the only real things were the ads. The scammers infected 1.7 million computers with malware that remotely directed traffic to “spoofed” websites—“empty websites designed for bot traffic” that would serve up a video ad purchased from one of the internet’s vast programmatic ad exchanges but that were designed, according to the indictments, “to fool advertisers into thinking that an impression of their ad was served on a premium publisher site,” like that of Vogue or The Economist.

Views, meanwhile, were faked by malware-infected computers with marvelously sophisticated techniques for imitating humans: Bots “faked clicks, mouse movements, and social network login information.” Some browsed the internet in order to gather tracking cookies from other websites, just as a human visitor would. Fake people with fake cookies and fake social-media accounts, fake-moving their fake cursors, fake-clicking on fake websites.