Myspace looked like it was back, but was a pawn in an ad fraud scheme • Hacker News Board

Re: Myspace looked like it was back, but was a pawn in an ad fraud scheme

#31

Post by jack9 » Sat, Oct 28, 2017, 4:44 PM UTC

mratzloff wrote: post #6

jack9 wrote: post #4

Viant (aka Specific Media) is a well known fraudster. Nobody in the ad industry thought MySpace was "back" after you heard who bought it years ago. The Vanderhooks (the brothers who founded Specific and continue to run all their schemes) pioneered the pop-under and have been running darker scams ever since. I worked for Specific for a few years and the brothers were refreshingly tech savvy. The penchant for fraud was…

Why did you work for them for a few years if they were engaging in fraud?

Fraud is generally done at the operational and deal level. When discovered (technically), I made it clear that I would not participate directly. The fraud is so pervasive, that individual departments defraud the company at times. The short answer was that I moved to other projects. I made a couple of enemies by pointing out nasty schemes. The technical challenges were large scale and unlimited budget. Hard to turn down the experience when I was under 30.

Re: Myspace looked like it was back, but was a pawn in an ad fraud scheme

#32

Post by scientistem » Sat, Oct 28, 2017, 5:28 PM UTC

AlexCoventry wrote: post #27

scientistem wrote: post #23

This is certainly click fraud. Is that fraud in the legal sense?

If it can be demonstrated that your'e intentionally and knowingly deceiving someone in order to separate them from their money, it's fraud.

In this case, it’s not clear who the fraudsters deceived. If it’s the advertisers, how do you demonstrate malice rather than, uhh, stupidity? If it’s the consumers, that just seems like effective adertising.

I guess, this is certainly colloquial fraud, but is there any evidence this could lead to a criminal suit?

Re: Myspace looked like it was back, but was a pawn in an ad fraud scheme

#33

Post by meritt » Sat, Oct 28, 2017, 5:42 PM UTC

jack9 wrote: post #4

Viant (aka Specific Media) is a well known fraudster. Nobody in the ad industry thought MySpace was "back" after you heard who bought it years ago. The Vanderhooks (the brothers who founded Specific and continue to run all their schemes) pioneered the pop-under and have been running darker scams ever since. I worked for Specific for a few years and the brothers were refreshingly tech savvy. The penchant for fraud was…

I worked at an ad network about a decade ago and we had a partner spending about $10k/day buying traffic that was directly from click/bot farms. They were fully aware of this fact and continued buying as much as possible. We couldn't understand why.

Later we figured it out: Their revenue model was selling display advertising on their own website. The bot traffic inflated their Comscore/Hitwise/Alexa rankings and as a result they could negotiate significantly higher deals.

Re: Myspace looked like it was back, but was a pawn in an ad fraud scheme

#34

Post by shostack » Sat, Oct 28, 2017, 10:56 PM UTC

joseph_b wrote: post #7

jack9 wrote: post #4

Viant (aka Specific Media) is a well known fraudster. Nobody in the ad industry thought MySpace was "back" after you heard who bought it years ago. The Vanderhooks (the brothers who founded Specific and continue to run all their schemes) pioneered the pop-under and have been running darker scams ever since. I worked for Specific for a few years and the brothers were refreshingly tech savvy. The penchant for fraud was…

I can confirm. I too used to work there (hi Jack9, good to see you're still around). The owners were secretive and good at compartmentalizing their actions. So, it took a long time to figure out what they were trying to do. Although pure speculation, I would not bet against their complicity in this latest round of fraud.

Can you elaborate on the compartmentalization? Want the code base accessible to all engineers? Or is that not what you're referring to?

Re: Myspace looked like it was back, but was a pawn in an ad fraud scheme

#35

Post by shostack » Sat, Oct 28, 2017, 11:01 PM UTC

meritt wrote: post #33

jack9 wrote: post #4

Viant (aka Specific Media) is a well known fraudster. Nobody in the ad industry thought MySpace was "back" after you heard who bought it years ago. The Vanderhooks (the brothers who founded Specific and continue to run all their schemes) pioneered the pop-under and have been running darker scams ever since. I worked for Specific for a few years and the brothers were refreshingly tech savvy. The penchant for fraud was…

I worked at an ad network about a decade ago and we had a partner spending about $10k/day buying traffic that was directly from click/bot farms. They were fully aware of this fact and continued buying as much as possible. We couldn't understand why. Later we figured it out: Their revenue model was selling display advertising on their own website. The bot traffic inflated their Comscore/Hitwise/Alexa rankings and as a…

Going one further, when I was in the agency world there was a major publisher whose goals were buying traffic for $.01. they did not care about quality.

When I found out about this and pressed the agency team, I learned it was because they were arbitraging it into inflated reach for justifying their CPMs and then selling the garbage traffic.

This stuff is pretty pervasive and the reason why savvy media buyers bill off their own IAP certified numbers with some quality/viewability vendor in place.

Re: Myspace looked like it was back, but was a pawn in an ad fraud scheme

#36

Post by shostack » Sat, Oct 28, 2017, 11:03 PM UTC

diogenescynic wrote: post #13

Facebook is probably also juking their stats. I don’t trust any of their numbers.

I dislike how FB presents their data by default, but if you know where to look or how to set things up it is something you can mitigate (unless you need to get view data into your ad server for something using Custom Audiences which they don't allow).

It is admittedly less of an issue for performance advertisers than brand advertisers as the former can rely more heavily on conversion tracking to inform quality.