SEE NO EVIL

Companies pay millions to get their digital ads in front of humans. Shady networks show them to bots instead. And everyone is fine with this.

- MORGAN MEAKER

WHEN ALEKSANDR ZHUKOV went on trial last year, he stood accused of defrauding US companies, including The New York Times and pet care brand Purina, out of millions of dollars. According to the US Attorney's Office, the then 41-year-old Russian set up a company that promised to show online advertisements to humans and instead placed those ads on an elaborate network of fake websites where they were seen only by bots. But his defense did not center around rejecting those claims or demonstrating remorse. Rather, Zhukov said he was giving the online economy exactly what it wanted: cheap traffic, whatever the source.

"There was nothing to conceal," he said on the stand in May 2021. "We were making business. We are not making scam or fraud."

A federal jury in Brooklyn disagreed, and in November 2021, Zhukov was sentenced to 10 years in prison. By extraditing him from Bulgaria, the US justice system sent a message that this type of crime has consequences. Yet Zhukov's testimony highlights an uncomfortable truth: The online economy is often willing to look the other way while bots distort it and line the pockets of cybercriminals.

Bots are polluting the internet. Fake users make up as much as 40 percent of all web traffic, according to some estimates. Researchers specializing in advertising fraud describe a Kafkaesque system in which businesses pay millions to advertise to humans but end up advertising to bots. Yet the digital advertising industry has grown so accustomed to working with bot-inflated numbers that few are willing to unmask the fake clicks powering much of the online economy.