Slashdot Mirror
The Vanishing Click-Fraud Case
PreacherTom writes "In March of 2004, a computer programmer arrived at Google's offices with one goal in mind: blackmail. He had invented a program called "Google Clique", which could generate millions of fake clicks to Google's ads. The price to avoid disaster: $150,000. At the time, it didn't end well for the programmer; Google had the police in the next room. However, a few days ago the U.S. Attorney quietly dropped the case. The reason: apparently Google was unwilling to cooperate with prosecutors. Why the odd behavior?"
Did Google hire the guy?
It's a serious question; some firms actually do hire the black hatters who targetted them.
One possibility that he was playing chicken with google and his software really didn't work as advertised. He probably figured that to an individual, $150k is a lot of money, but to google it is the proverbial fart in a windstorm so they would just let it slide under the table rather than generate lots of press. However, he figured wrong and even though google isn't pressing charges(perhaps due to the fact that they would reveal more information than its worth) the huckster still got just deserts: he did spend some time in prison and his name is pretty much ruined forever. Would you want to hire the guy who tried to defraud google out of $150k? Can't imagine it would help his job prospects any.
Monstar L
This got me thinking. Perhaps he wanted the lump sum which he assessed as being the value of running it a number of months, until Google caught up with him and repaired the bug. Which then suggests a possible scenario in which he didn't so much come planing to blackmail, but rather came planning to sell his information. Mind you, I don't know the guy or the situation really. Some people have said he's a real knob, which could be. But I can easily imagine him identifying a hole, and thinking to himself "Hey I could use this, or I could sell it to anyone and everyone -- or I could sell it to google. That wouldn't be nearly as illegal as some options, and maybe they'd give me a real job." And then his line of thinking kind of spiraled out of control a bit. Google, fFor their part, saw a hacker kid, didn't really want to encourage him at all, but didn't see any need to nail him to a wall either. Code gets fFixed, kid goes fFree, Google doesn't spend a million dollars just to sue some geek.