A massive team of security companies and federal agencies worked together to shut down an enormous click fraud operation. Although 3ve, pronounced Eve, started as a small botnet, by the time it was sinkholed, it was using 1.7 million infected computers to falsify billions of ad views, which resulted in businesses paying over $29 million for ads that no real human internet users ever saw.
A Google-released whitepaper revealed that “3ve generated between 3 billion and 12 billion or more daily ad bid requests at its peak.” When announcing the unsealing of a 13-count indictment against eight defendants, the Department of Justice said the FBI took control of 31 domains and took information from 89 servers that were part of the botnet infrastructure engaged in digital advertising fraud activity.
