WASHINGTON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 29th May, 2021) A US court convicted Russian national Alexander Zhukov on four counts, his lawyer Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma told Sputnik.
"I can confirm that he [Zhukov] was convicted on all four counts," Margulis-Ohnuma said on Friday.
The office of the US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York noted that Zhukov was convicted by a Federal jury in Brooklyn of four counts of a superseding indictment that charged him with wire fraud conspiracy, wire fraud, money laundering conspiracy and money laundering.
Zhukov was extradited to the United States in January of 2019 from Bulgaria. He was among six Russian and Kazakh citizens indicted by the US Justice Department in 2018 for their involvement in an advertising fraud scheme.
"Today, after evaluating the evidence and wading through the complexities of digital advertising on the internet, the jury recognized the defendant for who he is a - fraudster who used computer code to steal millions from US companies," US Attorney Mark Lesko said. "Zhukov may have thought that he could get away with his fraud by carrying it out from halfway around the world, but this verdict sends a powerful message that US law enforcement will bring such cybercriminals to justice, wherever they are."
The Justice Department said in a press release that that Zhukov carried out his digital advertising fraud scheme through a purported advertising network called Media Methane between September 2014 and December 2016.
The company had business arrangements with other advertising networks whereby it received payments in return for placing advertising placeholders, the release said.
"Rather than place these ad tags on real publishers' websites, however, Media Methane rented more than 2,000 computer servers housed in commercial datacenters in Dallas, Texas, and Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and used those datacenter servers to load ads on fabricated websites, "spoofing" more than 6,000 domains," the release added.
As a result of this fraud activity, Zhukov was able to falsify billions of advertisement views and caused businesses to pay more than $7 million for ads that were never actually viewed by real human internet users, according to the release.
