A Russian hacker earned $5 MILLION PER DAY by falsifying ad views from his apartment

Aleksandr Zhukov ran a company called Media Methane from an apartment in Bulgaria
On paper, it was a real advertising agency placing video ads for companies like Nestlé, 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 he rented 2,000 servers in Dallas and Amsterdam, bought 650,000 IP addresses, and registered them under Verizon and Comcast so the traffic would appear to come from ordinary Americans
He coded a fake web browser that scrolled pages, clicked on ads, moved the mouse, and solved CAPTCHAs like a real person
His bots viewed 300 million video ads a day
Advertisers paid $13 per thousand views
At his peak, he earned $5 million a day while sleeping
He was caught because he argued with a client and flooded their inventory so much that all fraud alarms in a cybersecurity firm went off
The FBI arrested him in Bulgaria, extradited him to the U.S., and he received 10 years in federal prison
When he appeared in court, he told the judge: “I am a soldier without weapons facing a tank called the FBI”