This guy made $28 MILLION on eBay without ever selling something

His name is Shawn Hogan and in 2004 he built a free widget called "Geo Visitors" that showed bloggers where their visitors were coming from
The widget had a hidden second job every time anyone landed on a page with it installed, it silently dropped an eBay tracking cookie into their browser, and if that person bought anything on eBay in the next 30 days Shawn collected the commission
By 2006 the widget had stuffed 650,000 cookies and he was pulling in 15% of eBay's entire affiliate budget, making him the #1 affiliate out of 26,000
eBay flew him out to Vegas, fed him caviar at Alain Ducasse's restaurant inside Mandalay Bay, and gave him credit for private jet flights that he actually used
He was even careful enough to program his widget to never drop cookies on computers near eBay's San Diego headquarters
Eventually eBay built a sting called "Trip Wire" that placed an invisible 1 pixel image on their homepage to see whether his "referrals" were actually showing up to shop and it turned out 99% of his traffic was fake
The FBI raided his condo, he pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud and got 5 months in federal prison and a $25,000 fine
eBay paid him $28 million and only punished him for $25,000