As crimes go, committing digital fraud is pretty easy; you don’t even need to leave your house. If you know what you are doing, the likelihood of getting caught is pretty slim. And you can make a lot of money.
Earlier this year, a group of Russian hackers made between $3 million and $5 million a day with an elaborate digital ad fraud scheme called Methbot, according to White Ops, a digital advertising security company. The criminals created phony domains that looked like reputable publisher sites. They tricked ad exchanges into serving video ads on their fake pages and then used an army of bots to click and view the ads so they racked up income.