Category Archives: Zhukov

Accused ‘Methbot’ ringleader extradited to U.S.

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The accused ringleader of “Methbot,” an alleged digital ad fraud scheme, is scheduled to appear in Brooklyn court Friday to be arraigned on charges related to defrauding companies out of tens of millions of dollars. Aleksandr Zhukov, a 38-year-old Russian national, was extradited to the U.S. from Bulgaria Thursday, according to a spokesman for the Eastern District of New York. Zhukov is the lead defendant in the case, in which he and four other men are accused of renting more than 1,900 computer servers to simulate humans viewing ads on fabricated web pages. The group developed relationships with ad networks, which paid the Methbot group roughly $7 million in the fraud scheme, prosecutors said in a November indictment. Zhukov worked as the CEO of that group, described in the indictment as “Ad Network #1,” and directed roughly $5.4 million from one account into a corporate account located in New Zealand, prosecutors […]

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U.S. files charges in complex ad-fraud scheme that cost businesses tens of millions

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U.S. prosecutors in the Eastern District of New York filed a 13-count cybercrime indictment Tuesday against the suspected orchestrators of a scheme to defraud internet advertisers out of tens of millions of dollars. The indictment accuses the eight defendants, who hail from Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan, with criminal violations including wire fraud, computer intrusion, aggravated identity theft and money laundering. The list includes Aleksander Zhukov, one of the Department of Justice’s recent high-profile cybercrime arrests. The group between September 2014 and December 2016 ran a purported advertising network, called “Ad Network #1,” that used 1,900 computer servers to load ads on more than 5,000 fabricated websites, prosecutors said. Defendants also leased some 650,000 IP addresses to falsify billions of visits to those fake websites, charging real companies for ads that real humans never viewed, the indictment alleges. “As alleged in court filings, the defendants in this case used sophisticated computer programming and infrastructure […]

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