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Comment by jack9 | Hacker News Reader

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 always the dominant strategy (grown from a kernel of organic, like all good ad fraud).

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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.

I'm the journalist who wrote the story and I would love to hear from any current or former employees. craig.silverman at buzzfeed.com.

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

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.

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.

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

stolen money spends as good as earned money

Tell that to all my pesos.

These things are rarely gone over in the initial ramp up in my experience :)

It usually takes some time to see what the actual core values of an organization are.

Not years

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.

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