Dozens of big-name marketers and Internet companies have fallen victim to a scam orchestrated by a series of pornography sites.
In a new type of online-advertising fraud, these porn sites are trying to generate revenue by setting up junk pages and faking Web traffic. The porn sites include names such as hqtubevideos.com and pornoxo.com. It's unclear who owns the sites or how many visitors they have.
When a user visits one of these porn sites, the Web page launches dozens of pages that are hidden from the computer user. These hidden sites are filled with paid links to legitimate websites. Unbeknownst to the user, software built into the porn sites forces the user's computer to click on these links, sometimes hundreds of times, sending a flood of computer-generated traffic to legitimate websites.
No person is actually seeing or clicking on the ads, yet the operator of the scam collects commissions for directing traffic to sites like Web portal Lycos, video sites Mevio and Current TV, and others. And big advertisers, including Verizon Communications Inc. and TD Ameritrade Inc., are paying for ads that were never displayed to users. The websites say they weren't aware they were collecting money for ads that weren't shown.
"The criminal enterprise is very sophisticated," said Matthew Scott, an executive at AdSafe Media Ltd., a digital-ad protection company that says it discovered the scam, which ensnared some of its clients. "There has been explosive growth in the online advertising space, and at the same time, fraud and scams are evolving."
AdSafe said it has notified the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Google Inc. said its systems blocked the scam and it has contacted authorities to share the details of its investigation.
An FBI spokesman said the bureau doesn't comment on specific investigations but "is generally aware of these types of scams and is actively investigating a wide range of fraudulent cyber crime."
Several websites targeted by the scam said there weren't aware of the fraud until being contacted by the Journal.
"We have a 100% zero tolerance policy for that," said Ron Bloom, co-founder and chairman of Mevio.com. Current TV, which operates a cable TV channel, said it has filters in place to block traffic to its website from porn sites, and the traffic it received wasn't authorized. Lycos, whose yellowpages.lycos.com site received traffic from the porn sites, said it was investigating the matter.
Marketers and the companies involved in delivering the online ads said they take measures to combat such fraud.
"We are aware of these scams and aggressively fighting such advertising fraud with robust monitoring systems and investigative procedures," a Verizon spokesman said. "When we discover a scam we take immediate action."
Fraud has plagued the online-advertising business nearly since its beginning. Marketers constantly are on the watch for so-called click fraud. And this isn't the first time hoax websites have been a problem. But the problem has evolved to a new level of complexity.
"Occasionally a bad actor will circumvent even the best systems," said Google spokesman Rob Shilkin.
While it is hard to determine the actual scope of this fraud, advertising companies and websites say that such scams represent a small portion of their traffic.
AdSafe, the online-ad security firm, said its preliminary research found more than one thousand websites with possible links to the scam. In some instances it found more than 5,000 "invisible ads" being shown to an individual consumer after one visit to a porn site. AdSafe said the scheme likely has been running for at least several months.
Other experts said it is hard to measure the impact of online-ad fraud because it occurs in small scales across a broad network of websites. "It is death by a thousand paper cuts," said Ben Edelman, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School who studies Internet advertising and says that he comes across an average of 50 such scams a month.
A Journal analysis of the computer code transmitted during visits to one of the porn sites, hqtubevideos.com/play.html, revealed the site opens dozens of invisible pages—invisible to the user—with innocuous-sounding names such as relaxhealth.com and baldnesshealth.com.
Those sites are filled with paid links and have minimal content. In some cases they are hidden in tiny windows on the porn site that are no bigger than a single screen pixel. But they appear as normal pages in communications with other websites.
"We want to make sure we get the maximum value for our advertising dollars, and we always seek to stay ahead of the latest technique for abuse," said Robert Haverback, vice president of advertising at TD Ameritrade. "We and other advertisers need to stay on top of this." AT&T declined to comment.
Online-ad fraud prevention firm Double Verify says about 31% of the $100 million of online ad spending that it monitors each month is wasted for instances ranging from fraud to ads that are targeted to the wrong location.
"These guys pop up like mushrooms, they change their names and location and sites and come up with a new fraud and a new site with a different name," says Oren Netzer, chief executive of Double Verify. "It is a cycle where we always have to chase them down."
[Via
Wall Street Journal]
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