[goldstategop]

NPCs?

[vette6387]

Russians, the world’s crap people!

[mindburglar]

This is Google’s and Facebook’s and countless other internet companies’ business model. If it’s found out they employed bots to pump up hits so they could charge more, it would mean billions of $ in lawsuits.

A nice way to bring these oligarchs down.

[dennisw]

Aleksandr Zhukov, Boris Timokhin, Mikhail Andreev, Denis Avdeev, Dmitry Novikov, Sergey Ovsyannikov, Aleksandr Isaev and Yevgeniy Timchenko were charged with.......

They followed the google business model. The fake hits and clicks business model.

[Mark was here]

It is not the responsibility of the State, to determine if “likes” are real.

The State can not even verify if votes are real.

[Getready]

Huh? You mean people lie and pretend to be somethin’ they ain’t and steal from you? Nah...we are stardust...we are golden...gotta hand it to the thieves for being so ingenious....probably just the tip of the iceberg regarding computer based fraud...

[stockpirate]

How many of these bots are paid to follow politicians, movie stars?

[rawcatslyentist]

So, extra fake people views equals fraud?

How about less actual people views? cough cough fakebook, googletube.....

Fraud is fraud, advertisers rightfully use actual views as what they are paying for. To defraud either way is to defraud.

[Liz]

......an alleged widespread digital advertising fraud used "botnets"..... gave the appearance of billions of humans looking at online ads.......

Democrats' "provisional voters?"

[JParris]

I for one feel much safer now.

{eye roll}

[Fido969]

I thought this would be about the Ray-Ban ad.

[minnesota_bound]

Google does this and has been caught by big advertisers. Google would only refund some of the money and did so only after being caught of course. I suspect twitter, facebook do the same as they got their start with lying about their numbers when putting out their IPO and committing stock fraud.

[Vlad The Inhaler]

The DOJ has become the Department Of Jokesters

Too bad they don’t expend this kind of energy on cleaning out the nest of vipers who peddled government influence for millions, destroyed evidence by the ton, tried to rig the 2016 election, tried (and continue to try) to overthrow a president and turn the Republic into a socialist/communist state.

And no, it wasn’t the Russians who did all this.

[moovova]

You mean Nehru jackets AREN'T coming back in style? What am I gonna do with this jacket I bought after seeing 27,000 "Likes" at the retailer's website...

[Zathras]

I originally thought this was more a pile of nothing.
Then I thought, if billions are viewing ads, it is mega millions going to companies and people posting these ads.

The could be very big.
Assuming the DOJ is less than clueless ....again.

[Henchster]

DOJ unseals charges in alleged online massive ad VOTE fraud

Now THERE's a headline that would mean the DOJ is actually doing something.

[Leep]

All is fake...very little real.

[zeugma]

This kind of thing is the reason I simply don’t understand why companies think web ads are worth anything at all. It is trivial to set up a bot to ‘hit’ any webpage. I mean =really= trivial. The only thing I’d pay for would be when someone actually purchased something. Google and Fakebook’s business models are almost entirely based on fraud of this nature.

[a fool in paradise]

Does anyone even respond to online ads for anything but a movie trailer (because they wouldn’t have known enough about the movie otherwise)?