A Russian man has been convicted by the United States Department of Justice for being a known operator of the “Methbot” advertising fraud campaign. Aleksandr Zhukov, otherwise known as the “King of Fraud”, was sentenced to ten (10) years in prison for acts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, wire fraud, conspiracy to commit money laundering, and money laundering. Zhukov was originally arrested in 2018 and was later extradited to the United States a year later to face his crimes. He has already served roughly three (3) years of his sentence and will have served its entirety by 2028. Zhukov and additional threat actors created a fake advertisement network which, instead of deploying advertisements on real websites, displayed the proposed advertisements in a closed environment giving the illusion that humans were interacting with the website/ads. However, these actors rented roughly 2,000 servers and configured each to be its own human-like bot; programmed to click around the screen several times, simulating mouse movement, bypass captchas, signed into fake social media accounts, and accept browser cookies. It is believed that Zhukov and associates spoofed well over 6,000 websites including the New York Post and New York Times. These advertisement campaigns were never seen by actual humans nor deployed on actual sites.