In just 100 daysa group of software developers raise a business with the capacity to generate income of up to $117,000 per year. It is a crime, one of those that has been growing the most in recent years and in which criminal networks are involved, but also the world’s largest technology companies. The theme night issue Don’t clicka documentary that addresses How digital ad fraud operations work, a very buoyant business that affects both users and small advertisers. “For every three dollars spent on online advertising, one goes to fraudsters.”
Advertising is the basis of the current digital universe. “It is a major source of revenue for some of the biggest companies in the world and has shaped very small details of our online experience,” explains Tim Hwang, writer and former Google employee. The Internet has not changed the traditional advertising model, but it has changed the way it is managed. It is what is known as programmatic advertisinga model that facilitates the distribution of advertisements and allows advertisers to reach an audience profile, in theory, related to their interests.
Hundreds of web pages are created expressly to execute digital advertising frauds
For criminals, intervening and taking advantage of this ecosystem is very simple. Just create a handful of websites and fill them with content, in order to appear to be a legitimate site in the face of traditional engines like Google, and thus be able to generate traffic. Therein lies the first fraud, since this content does not have to be original or verified, so people resort to copying from other portals or, directly, inventing the information.
The next step is generate traffic to those web pages through bots and contact advertising networkswhich connect advertisers and websites. That’s how simple the formula is to extract money from the digital advertising ecosystem, a fraud that generates millions of dollars for crime, and that It also has thousands of victims.
Thousands of victims
Starting with the advertisersto whom part of the money they invest on the internet is stolen, redirecting traffic from your ads to other portals. It also sometimes has a high reputational cost for them, since advertising networks do not always take into account the content profile of the portals in which the ads are inserted. They are automatic processes that depend on numbers.
Los users They are also victims of these networks. In the Google Play Store, the main application download space in the world, there are multiple applications that download malware to your phone. This allows criminals use that terminal to generate traffic to some portals and click on certain ads. A fraud of which, in addition, the poorest and most vulnerable people tend to be victims, who may be paying without knowing it for the malicious use of their data. “It has always been said that it is a business without victims, but it is not like that. The financial survival of many people depends on this. The lack of security can make money for Google, which is stealing money from many people,” experts explain.
“It has always been said that it is a business without victims, but it is not like that. The financial survival of many people depends on this”
The third major victim is the media and democracywith the proliferation of spaces, apparently reliable, but far from the dictates of journalistic ethics. “The media have become very competitive and want to charge more and more for advertising,” which directs the content towards attractive news, rewarded by search engines like Google. This is how it begins vicious circle that limits visits to traditional and proven media, pushing those of fake news sites, which ends up economically suffocating the former.
Source: www.rtve.es
