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Comment by trasz | Hacker News Reader

So what’s illicit about it, compared to the usual ad business?

If an advertiser says "place this ad, but not on TPB", and a network says "sure, we'll run your ad, and not on TPB", and then through trickery runs the ad on TPB, but in a way that fools the advertisers auditor, that is clear fraud.

Isn't this more like a network says "if you run this ad on your nice-and-fluffy-site, we'll pay you $x" and the nice-and-fluffy-site says "yep, we'll run this ad on our site" but runs this ad on TPB instead ?

I.e. as far as I understood the particular situation described by OP, the breach of contract happens between the site and network, not between the network and advertiser.

The parties to the frauds may be different than I understood. That’s part of good crimeing ;-) I’m not in the trade, and don’t know how people distinguish networks, from resellers, from publishers. The whole world of advertising tends to blur together in a giant ball of mutual fraud from my vantage.

This is answered in the article!

It’s not. The article simply assumes that actions that the ad networks don’t like are somehow “illicit”, without providing a rationale.

These guys are delivering ads for Lexus to moviepiracy.com by using an intermediate server that obscures the actual target site. Lexus doesn't want its brand associated with these types of sites and would normally prevent this from happening. Intermediary collects the money.

I know some people that made tons of money simply for setting up the arbitrage, shell companies that would sell ad space to big brands promising top tier media orgs and then turn around and buy it directly from porn, gaming and piracy sites.

Same thing as this article, but without actually building the technology themselves, simply being the middleman.

Officially Lexus doesn’t want that, in reality, they care about sales.

They’ll be upset if this “gray” traffic doesn’t convert well, but Lexus buyers just might be the type with the disposable income for gambling.

My assumption was they were displaying ads and falsifying the clicks to the ads and getting money (fraud?)

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