A Russian hacker made $5 MILLION A DAY faking ad views from his apartment

Aleksandr Zhukov ran a company called Media Methane out of a Bulgarian apartment
On paper it was a real ad agency that placed video ads for companies like Nestle, Comcast, and The New York Times
Except he wasn’t placing them anywhere real
He built 6,000 fake websites that looked exactly like ESPN, CNN, Vogue, and Fox News
Then rented 2,000 servers in Dallas and Amsterdam, bought 650,000 IP addresses, and registered them to Verizon and Comcast so the traffic looked like regular Americans
He coded a fake web browser that scrolled pages, clicked ads, moved the mouse and solved CAPTCHAs like a real person
His bots watched 300 million video ads a day
Advertisers paid $13 per thousand views
At peak he was pulling $5 million a day while he slept
Got caught because he got into a fight with a client and spammed their inventory so hard it tripped every fraud alarm at a cybersecurity firm
FBI arrested him in Bulgaria, extradited him to the US, 10 years in federal prison
When he got to court he told the judge: “I’m a weaponless soldier in front of a tank with name FBI”