Slashdot Mirror
Man Accused of Attempting to Extort Google
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..."
Want to really annoy your competition ? Do the same thing actually on a google search page - just make it "search" 1000 times for words that bring up your competitions 'adwords' box, then "click" the adwords link. Google then bills your competitor for the maximum (s)he specified per day/week/month and, bonus!, your competitor then drops down the rankings for which google Adword to display...
Random words mixed in with the key ones, random delays between searches, random User-Agent, etc., etc. Seems like it would be easy to do, and hard to track...
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
I wonder how long he had to Google before he figured out the technical details of how to do that? ;-)
;-)
Search terms: "how to extort" AND money AND "from google"
You can find articles about the fellow by looking at the top Google hits for "moron," "fucktard," and "what the hell were you thinking?"
Next time, just go straight to the spammers.
That's a real nice website you have here... a shame if anything were to happen to it...
Isn't this what Slashdot is trying to do? No?
Martin
I'm amazed that this guy thought that google would pay out. If he was clever he would set up a few websites and rake the money in slowly over a length of time. I guess greed got the better of him.
feeling lucky
Creationists are a lot like zombies. Slow, but powerful and numerous. And they all want to eat our brains.
Next time don't go to those you are trying to extort. Just go straight to the competition. I'm sure the spammers would have paid him much more than $100,000 collectively and not turned him in.
Imagine, he could have licensed his software to the spammers and charged them an annual fee to use it. He could have been the "Microsoft" of the spamming industry.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Hi. I'm Troy McClure. You might remember me from such search-engine fraud films as "The Altavistan Job", "The Great Dogpile Caper", and "Lycos Grifters IV: Electric Boogaloo".
...a new revenue stream.
Hi little guy, this is Cmdr.Taco... We're going to link to your site in an article. What? You say you can't handle the traffic? For the low low cost of $699 we can grant you a license to mirror your site on our finely tuned slashdot-proof servers.
This guy tried to extort the search engine that allows you to find almost anything including almost anybody and he was expecting to not get caught?
Stupid!
Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree. -Martin Luther
How is falsely inflating banner views and click-throughs not fraud? You are defrauding the company in order that they will pay you for advertising that was never "aired" to the public.
For your Occupation, choose 2 of the following three:
1) Fun
2) Well-paying
3) Legal
This guy probably was legal up to the point of threatening Google. I guess that the fine line between the criminal mind and normal everyday greed.
I need a TiVo for my car. Pause live traffic now.
"Come out with your hard drives up or we'll send in the slashdotters and Shaft!"
The way of the future... Just wait till Bush catchs on, Cowboy Neal and Taco will be billionairs with an army of geeks on hand...
TO THE SLASHDOT MOBILE!
--- [Insert intresting Sig here]
I figured out and wrote a perl script to increase my karma. Give me $1200 worth of ThinkGeek stuff, or I'll post it in the forums!!!!
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
A series of funny quotes come to mind: 'You want I should break your links?' 'Mario, I need you to 404 this site.' 'I will ping flood you so fast, you wont know what hit you.' 'I host your site. You've never google me. You dont visit my page. And now you want me to bring down this site. What am I supposed to think?' 'Johhny, I swear, I'll get you your page hits. I just need some more time.'
The flying hamster of DOOM rains coconuts on your pitiful city.
Very similar to the google case, I think step 4 only applies to the lawyers
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
Spammers, on the other hand, have now moved onto blogs lately. Fred Rodriguez, a rider Emeryville, CA, for italian team Aqua e Sapone has spams for the usual penis enlargment, diet pills, cheap computer eqz, etc. on his guest book. Spammers got no shame, just like this fool.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
He was very easy to track down. Apparently, a red flag gets raised at Google whenever anyone actually clicks on those ads. So, they eliminated the guy who needed ink jet cartridges and sent the police in.
There are no karma whores, only moderation johns
Every SlashDotter should click on every advertisement that you see on Slashdot. Slashodot will get paid and the advertisers will get a heavy bill - everyone wins.
That would be a nice technology to add to Mozilla 1.x where it automatically hides the advertisement and treats it like a click through where advertisers get tired of paying out.
This brings up some other related concerns about having robots browse pages, even when the intent is not malicious.
Some ads on websites are sold 'per-view' and not 'per-click', but if a web-crawling robot hits it, should it count as a view? Are the authors of these bots stealing from the advertiser?
A while ago I wrote a bot that posts to slashdot. He even had decent Karma for a while, before getting a bit confused. In any case, my bot would usually post some links in his comments, which could have the effect of altering the target's page ranking on Google (this was not his purpose though). Am I somehow culpable for cheating Google?
Anyway, the point is that I think robots should have some limited rights to view pages and do human-like behavior on the net.
Anyone remember the company AllAdvantage (was that really the name?) that paid users to click on ads during the dotcom boom? I remember almost everyone was into it ... people were making hundreds, even thousands of dollers per month.
... set it up to run all night, go to sleep, wake up rich in the morning. That's probably why the thing was so popular!
... the idea being that if the mouse wasn't moving, but clicks were coming in, then it was a cheat.
Of course, none of the ad traffic was legitimate! There were tons and tons of scripts and programs that would click the ads for you
I remember the comany would implement anti-cheat methods every couple of weeks, even to the point of tracking mouse movements
Ok, well... as always, cheaters take things to the next level. The ultimate cheat was one that surfed the web from a pre-determined list of web sites, while randomly moving the mouse cursor around the screen, and clicking every couple of seconds. Worked like a charm!
No more AllAdvantage.
Google has more sophisticated technology than AllAdvantage though... its almost impossible to cheat google. Even if this dumb-ass really did write a program to click ads on his own sites, google would catch that. There's AdSense partners getting canned every day for suspicion of cheating, when sometimes it's only as simple as an innocent erroneous click on their own ads. It happens... check the adsense forums. I doubt this guy would have been able to execute much of his plan successfully.
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
a pair of those blinking Nikes while running away from the cops?
-FL
this never would've happened if they didn't offer google in "hacker"
and if you see me strut, remind me of what left this outlaw torn...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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...
I uhhh... made the same program last year in January or so at a client's request. I was skeptical that I could defraud Google's AdWords, but I ended up being successful. Out of respect, I never gave the client's his program even though it worked and sent it over to Google and told them about their vulnerability.
Defrauding Google, is like defrauding a family member or something...
I'm glad this ass got caught.
-- D3X
* Google does not pay website owners for AdWords. The owners pay Google to for advertising space on Google. /. uses it sometimes as well.
Not true. You can use their adsense program. I think
http://www.google.com/services/ http://www.google.com/adsense
If I'm actually looking to buy something, and I see an ad that is *relevant*, sure I'll click on it. We advertise heavily on AdWords ourselves and get a phenomenal amount of traffic on them, with click-throughs over 25% on certain keyword combinations.
The problem is that this guy's (alleged) program's sole purpose was to commit fraud.
To continue your gasoline example, it'd be like developing a method to fool the 'pay-at-the-pump' system into giving you gas without actually charging your credit card, and then telling the gas station that if they don't give you $100,000, you'll publish the program in the USA Today(tm).
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.
How do I keep track of people who are fingering
Google dosen't just have text link adds on Googles website. They also have ads on OTHER peoples websites and pay those websites for that.
With out banner adds or pop ups (Thwap the guy who called Google ads POP UPS) you'll need some software on your server to make this work.
Im guessing this guy hacked this software so he can send bad any data he wants and is expecting Google to act like Microsoft and pay to keep it quiet.
He picked the wrong target. Find a defect in Windows.. a nasty one.. and bribe Microsoft to stay quiet. They appear all fine with the extrotion scams and all about security by obscurity.
(I'm joking BTW.. Try that and Microsoft will thump you something nasty AND clame your defect is fraudulent)
I don't actually exist.
That 25% is only on a few very specific search phrases, but we honestly do get that high on those phrases. The reason is that for those phrases we are more relevant than the actual search results *in our geographic area*.
We get 10%+ click-through on the most completely generic term for the site. It could possibly be higher, but we also rank first in the normal search results for that term, if you limit your search to one particular country or use the country name as part of the search. Being able to limit AdWords to individual countries is one of the great things about Google - Overture isn't half as good in this regard.
Our *average* click-through over all phrases is much lower, at 3%, largely because with a lot of the other product words we use, people *would* be just searching for information on the product, rather than with a view to purchase. We could raise the click-through by only displaying ad if the search term included words such as 'buy', 'purchase', etc. but 3% is well above Google's cut-off and we aren't paying for the extra impressions, only the clicks, so this suits us fine. We still rank first on most of these search terms (e.g. competing AdWords are seen as less relevant).
was I able to make a little over $5 with only 3 clicks on the ads I'm displaying. I used Commission Junction for about a year and racked in 70,000+ impressions with about 7000 click thrus. Didn't make a penny. That's why I went to a subscription based web-site. After a review not too long ago I decided to cut down the number of sections that require a pass. Those major sections that don't require a pass now have Google Ads.
The rate variance is why Google doesn't tell you how much a click is worth. It varies from a few cents to a few dollars and possibly more depending on the ad. I run a programming site so I get some expensive programming ads.
Google is being incredibly generous with their AdSense program and I would hope Google would be able to find a way to take out the idiots who try to abuse it rather than cripple the program.
At the start all ad programs paid decently for click-thrus but morons abused it and morons ran the programs so they couldn't deal with it. Or they simply decided they could make more money if they went pay per sale since the advertisers would get the same amount (or more since web-sites got desperite and would flood visiters) of exposure for a lot less money.
It's an absolutly retarded program from a publisher's view. You basically have to sell the ad. You have to dedicate the page the ad is on to the ad so that people will buy what the ad is selling. The standard is about a 1.0% click-thru rate. And of those you now have a fraction of a percent that will compulsive buy. I had one text ad with Commission Junction that did a 10% click thru rate. But I would only get paid if someone bought the book right then. Nobody did so I never got paid. But the seller got lots of free publicity.
One major game development web-site I know has basically signed up for every ad program on the planet and then ran it through their custom script that selects which program to display an ad from to the visitor. I noticed they have Google Adsense worked into the mix as well. I have to wonder how much that stupid monkey and other flashing banners are worth that they don't just stick with Google and dump the rest of the ad systems.
Ben
Work Safe Porn