NYPD Arrests Ninth Methbot Gang Member

The New York City Police Department has arrested a ninth member of the Methbot click-fraud gang, according to court documents.

Sergey Denisoff’s arrest comes one year after eight other Methbot members were charged and arrested. Denisoff was not named in the original court filing, but was named part of the group in an affidavit filed with the U.S. District Court of Eastern New York originally posted by CyberScoop.

NYPD Detective Mark Rubins testified in the affidavit that Denisoff operating an advertising network that purported to place ads on actual, functioning websites when in fact the ads were placed on fake sites that he and others created. They then allegedly faked ad traffic.

This was accomplished by the defendants by renting out nearly 2,000 computer servers from commercial datacenters and using them to load the ad tags onto fake, blank webpages located on spoofed domains.

“In this way, the Methbot defendants fabricated (or ‘spoofed’) more than 250,000 webpages distributed across more than 5,000 domains associated with online publishers, including the domains of thousands of businesses in the United States and multiple businesses in the Eastern District of New York,” the original indictment against the eight defendants stated.