This was estimated to be making $500K a month before being found... and was a work of pure genius.
I'm still not sure I understood the role of the "HGTV" sites and how the fraudster was getting money by showing the HGTV ads (even after reading the comments on the post explaining this). Weren't the ads on those parked domains enough to generate the revenue for the fraudster?
Is greed limited?
If the ads were only on their own domains, this could have gone undetected. The whole thing was discovered as a result of using those 'legit' websites, and as far as I can tell from the article, using those was an essential part of the scam, i.e. without it, it might not work... but I'm just wondering why.