“King of Fraud” is now behind bars after developing the Methbot Scheme

December 7, 2021
King of Fraud Methbot Scheme Russia Aleksandr Zhukov US Online Fraud

The United States Department of Justice sentenced the Russian’s “King of Fraud” to 10 years of jail after operating a massive digital advertising fraud scheme called ‘Methbot’.  This fraud scheme has stolen over $7 million from different companies across the United States.

The king of fraud, known by his real name as Aleksandr Zhukov, was sentenced to 10-year imprisonment inside the United States of America and instructed to turn over his assets, amounting to about $4 million. Aleksandr Zhukov was arrested last 2018 in a small town in Bulgaria and handed over to the US after a year of imprisonment there.

The man was convicted for money laundering violations, money laundering conspiracy, wire fraud, and wire fraud conspiracy last May of this year.

 

A massive scheme that made Zhukov worthy of the title “King of Fraud”

Aleksandr Zhukov and his colleagues organised a fake ad network that advertisers hired to portray ad campaigns. However, instead of putting the ads on legit websites, Zhukov’s team rented over a thousand servers at a data centre that the hackers modified to act as webservers to display their fake customers’ advertisements. The actors then customised these servers (bots) to imitate the behaviour of human beings that views their page, including the displayed malicious ads.

According to the US report, Zhukov’s team created the illusion of human internet users and visitors that views their advertisement loaded onto these spoofed webpages to develop active traffic and web usage. Furthermore, the bots are programmed to click around the screen, act like a human watching a video, simulate the cursor moving, and scroll down the spoofed web page.

By taking advantage of these bots, Zhukov and his team generated pseudo-traffic to the sites from September 2014 to December 2016.  Advertisers paid Zhukov heft amounts of money to drive their online marketing campaigns and gain popularity. However, they did not know that their advertisements were played by fraud inside the cloned and spoofed websites.

To this day, it is speculated that Zhukov’s scammer group spoofed about 6,000 websites, most notably are the New York Post and The New York Times. Analysts also added that no ads of companies that paid Zhukov were displayed on legitimate sites; therefore, no one has seen their paid advertisements.

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