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Man Accused of Attempting to Extort Google

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the future-of-cybercrime dept.

sandalwood writes "A programmer has been arrested on charges of attempting to "threaten Google with a software program he devised that creates phony clicks on pop-up advertisements delivered by Google. Google pays Web site publishers companies a certain amount for legitimate hits on those ads, but Bradley created a method that generates false clicks that appeared to be real Internet traffic, which would have repeatedly defrauded Google... Bradley contacted Google in early March, informing company officials that he had created the program and wanted $100,000 to keep him from selling it to spammers, according to an affidavit by a U.S. Secret Service agent." A harbinger of organized crime to come? That's a real nice website you have here... a shame if anything were to happen to it..."

6 of 302 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Or vice versa by stonebeat.org · · Score: 4, Informative

    actually this will not work. Google use statistical data to stop the user from doing this. It will almost have to be a DDOS attack (i.e. have thousands of IP addresses click on the AD) to pull this off. In that case it would be much easier just to DDOS the website of your competitor. Just like what happened to SCO.com

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    Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
  2. No results, but five advert boxes by blorg · · Score: 5, Informative

    Ironically, while that exact search does actually come up with 0 results, there are 5 'sponsored links' offering 'Secrets behind AdWords', 'Create AdWords Cash' and so on...

  3. Re:Or vice versa by AndroidCat · · Score: 5, Informative

    That's why the article mentions spammers. The (old) trick works by sending out spam that generates a click-through when someone opens the email. (Or previews it in LookOut.) That way it comes from a whole bunch of IP addresses of people dumb enough to allow HTML script to run in their email.

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  4. Re:Story Full of Errors? by nsingapu · · Score: 4, Informative

    Google does not pay website owners for AdWords. The owners pay Google to for advertising space on Google.

    Google does pay website owners for displaying adwords, in its adsense program.

    The problem with the guys attempted extortion is that google charges advertisers more then it pays out on the adds, and as such this guys program, if sucessful, still makes google a buck. That said the amount advertisers pay on adds is determined by a number of criteria such as CTR (which is why googles adds are generally of good quality; better, more relevant, and therefore more clickable adds can be put in top positions for less then irrelevant adds) and as such something of this nature could potentially really screw up advertising related statistics and revenue for google.

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    How do I keep track of people who are fingering
  5. Organized crime is already in on it by Len · · Score: 4, Informative
    A harbinger of organized crime to come? That's a real nice website you have here... a shame if anything were to happen to it...
    This has been going on for a while. Just last week, for instance, some bookie sites in the UK were DoS'd and then received demands for money.
  6. Re:Or vice versa by Camel+Pilot · · Score: 4, Informative
    I have had similar experiences. Overture (aka yahoo) attempts to console you with their Click Protection buzz words. But in reality they do not filter out the even the most basic fraudulent clicks.

    Here is summary of my recent experience with Overture's Click Protection program. Overture e-mail responses are almost unbelievable.
    Overture claims to provide "Click Protection" for their pay-per-click advertising service. In reality they fail to prevent the most basic and easiest to detect non-authentic clicks - that is competitors clicking on competitors. They do not even filter out a customer clicking on their own links from within the Overture manager. Nor do they provide a method for an advertiser to test their own ad rendered URL's - a necessary function as a means to test the validity of an entered URL. Since filtering out such clicks would be simple and straight forward using established cookies or session id's - I can only speculate the reasons for not patching this obvious flaw and question the "sophistication of Overtures "Click Protection".