Hackers accused in the US of defrauding millions of dollars

Eight people mostly of Russian nationality were accused in the United States of setting up complex online advertising systems that have caused damages to companies for tens of millions of dollars, the Justice Department announced on Tuesday.

A Russian-Ukrainian, five Russians and two Kazakhs are being prosecuted for electronic fraud, computer intrusion, aggravated identity theft and money laundering.

Three of them were arrested abroad and are waiting to be extradited to the United States, but the others remain free.

"These people are accused of establishing a complex and fraudulent digital advertising infrastructure to deceive and defraud companies that they believed were acting with integrity and cost them millions of dollars," said William F. Sweeney, deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. (FBI) in New York, cited in a statement from the department.

Two international networks of cyber criminals were also dismantled, the dependency revealed.

According to the authorities, one of the schemes -implemented between 2014 and 2016- cost 7 million dollars for companies that bought online ads, but that were never seen by Internet users.

The defendants had, according to the text, servers programmed to simulate human activity on the Internet, surfing the web using a fake browser, with a false mouse pointer moving on the screen, launching and stopping a video in the middle, which also seemed be falsely connected to Facebook.

Another scheme, which ran from 2015 to 2018, led to the falsification of billions of advertising views.

According to the US justice system, this scheme has led companies to spend more than 29 million dollars on ads that were never really visible. In June, the United States imposed financial sanctions against five companies and three Russian people, accused of having supported piracy activities by Russia.

Date update on 2018-11-29. Date published on 2018-11-29. Category: hackers Author: Oscar olg Fuente: diariolibre
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