Category: Fraud
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Report: Fake Accounts and Bots are Proliferating Online; Social Media Companies Aren’t Stopping Them
Let’s say you were able to positively identify more than 15,000 fake social media accounts. You reported a significant number of them to social media platforms as fake. Nearly a month later, who many do you think would still be on the platform? If you said 95% of the fake…
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Brands, Agencies say Lack of ROI Proof & Ad Fraud are Biggest Threats to Digital Budgets
Digital advertising was supposed to give us more transparency. Better insight with a slew of metrics on clicks and conversions. The ability to draw a straight line from campaign performance to ROI. A way to stop wasting advertising dollars through micro-targeting and geo-targeting. Report after report show the incredible waste in…
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Study: 18% of all online ad traffic is fraudulent
Cybersecurity company CHEQ is led by Guy Tytunovich, a former Israeli military intelligence officer. He says the amount of online advertising fraud is grossly underestimated. A new study released by his company estimates that 18% of all online ad traffic is a fraudulent. That cost cost advertisers as much as…
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How Much of the Internet is Fake?
Seriously. If you haven’t read Max Reed’s article “How Much of the Internet Is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually” yet, stop what you’re doing and do it right now. Here are just a few of the gems Reed lays out: How much of the internet is fake?…
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Malicious Code Buried in Embedded Digital Ads
Read this before you click on another digital ad. Cyber criminals have used images within phishing emails for some time as a way to trick you into getting your credentials. Click on the image of the Excel spreadsheet or PDF file and instead of opening up the document, it takes…
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Digital Ad Fraud Continues to Grow; FTC Asked to Investigate Google
Senator Mark Warner (D-Virginia) has asked the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to investigate the prevalence of digital ad fraud. In particular he wants the FTC to look at Google in light of a BuzzFeed investigation uncovering more than 125 Android apps and websites that potentially siphoned off millions of dollars…
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Facebook Facing Charges of Fraud, Inflating Video Views by as Much as 900%
The folks suing Facebook for inflating video views now say it’s worse than they thought. Originally, the group said FB was jacking up video metrics by as much as 80% higher than they actually were by the way they were reporting them. Now, they say the real number is somewhere…
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Identity Theft is the fastest growing crime in the U.S.
The average suburban block has roughly 20 homes. Just among your closest neighbors, there are likely 4 families that have been victims of identity theft. The numbers are shocking: Bankrate.com says 41 million Americans have been the victim of identity theft. Think tank Privacy and American Business says the number is more…
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P&G Cuts Programmatic Ad Spend by 90% Due to Brand Safety Concerns
SUMMARY: The world’s largest advertiser is cutting back dramatically on ad networks and going back to traditional advertising. The result? Increased reach and decreased spend. The world’s largest advertiser, Procter & Gamble, announced they cut digital advertising spend in 2017 by a whopping $200 million dollars. Halfway through last year,…
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Year-long Google study of the dark web shows how accounts get hacked
The folks at Google teamed up with Carnegie Mellon to undertake an extensive study on how accounts get compromised. By searing the dark web, they identified some troubling things: 788,000 potential victims of off-the-shelf keyloggers 4 million potential victims of phishing kits 9 billion usernames and passwords exposed via data…
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Just as you always suspected, 260 million Facebook accounts are fakes
That means roughly 10% of Facebook accounts either aren’t real people or they belong to people that have multiple accounts. Why might you want more than one social media account? You might want to ask Golden State Warriors All-Star B-Ball player Kevin Durant. Facebook made the announcement during a recent…
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The IRS Tax Scam continues to take people’s money
Consumers filed more than 30,000 reports of scams with the Better Business Bureau in 2016. For the second year in a row, the top scam goes to… the IRS tax scam. In fact, the top three were the same as 2015’s list. New in 2016 were phishing scams and…
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Everytime there’s new technology, someone figures out a way to hack it, exploit, or infect it
Doesn’t it seems everytime there’s new technology, someone figures out a way to hack it, exploit, or infect it? 16 million homes have had a serious virus problem in the past two years. The conflicker virus alone has infected nearly 9 million computers. Even cars are being hacked. And there’s…
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Meet the Most Wanted U.S. Cyber Criminal
Joshua Samuel Aaron (aka Mike Shields) is wanted for a litany of crimes stemming from a scheme right out of the movies. He and his associates are charged with manipulating stock prices, driving them up artificially, and then dumping them for profit. The US Attorney for the Southern District of…
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Cyber Criminals now spreading ransomware through Facebook, LinkedIn
If you find a graphic or image on your computer and you don’t remember downloading it, stop before opening! Experts have seen a dramatic increase in what’s Locky Ransomware being shared by unsuspecting victims, now through social media platforms LinkedIn and Facebook. Ransomware is insidious. It locks up your computer…
Paul Dughi.com 