Scammers are masquerading as smart TV owners to fleece advertisers, researchers say
Scammers who have infiltrated the advertising ecosystem are using data centers to impersonate a range of connected devices in order to defraud marketers, according to new findings. New York-based security firm White Ops on Thursday disclosed a vast, ongoing scheme in which fraudsters are charging advertising companies for ad space on smart TVs, and then not delivering on their promise. To boost their credibility, the scammers are disguising bot activity which originates in global data centers as legitimate traffic in order to dupe anti-fraud services. The campaign, which White Ops has named Ice Bucket, is an updated version of the notorious Methbot/3ve scheme, in which scammers sold commercial advertising space in videos and websites that were never viewed by real humans. Methbot scammers earned roughly $29 million between 2014 and 2018, according to the Department of Justice, and also used data center traffic to seem legitimate. While White Ops declined […]
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