Fraud…
Posted in Oh noes.
This has to be one of the most brazen, although not very clever, examples of fraud I have seen- and I have seen quite a bit. From one ad call it loads over 500+ ad impressions. To add insult to injury it moves into forced CPC clicks from search engines. The computer making the recording eventually crashed from the pop-ups.
Advertising Fail.
Popularity: 30% [?]
Wayne,
Interesting video as usual. I have a new take on advertiser fraud that I stumbled into, or it is new to me.
I would like for you to see it and get your opinion. Please contact me.
Tim
It’s hard to tell what’s going on.
So the impressions are all redirects and the clicks are generating the popups that ultimately crashed the comp?
Mike Nolet has the same video on his blog. As he explained the advert in question is hosted on a web page loaded via an IFRAME. The web page that hosts the advertisement has a slew of invisible iframes as well, all of which load content that earns the fraudstar impression income. They use a similar trick with some malvertizements. Again, the malvertizement (aka malicious advertisement) loads via an IFRAME. Depending on the IP address of the viewing PC and various time and geotargetting rules, the advertisement host page may also contain extra IFRAME(s) that load malicious content such as fake security software alerts and whatnot.