Interesting discussion here, slamming both Reframed and Simon.<p>If you are reading this and wondering, the Simon character in this play follows a very common pattern for the "Ad Fraudster." This particular con takes advantage of two victims, a web site which thinks it can make money with advertising, and advertising networks who have excess advertising to sell.<p>One convinces the web site to host the javascript that will fetch ads from the network (they do that with an ads API call or when they are super bold they ask the web site to host a script that will fetch the script from the ad site and run it (yes people actually do this)) Then our fraudster drives traffic to the web site (botnets, click farms, what have you) to generate traffic and ad clicks. Which they collect from the ad agencies (and if they add affiliate tags affilliate fees) but tell the web site that it will take "90 days for the transactions to settle given everyone wants to limit click fraud."<p>Now depending on how much work they want to do and how much organic traffic the website gets, they can leech thousands of dollars a day off a web site. They feed fraudulent traffic in that keeps clicking on their ads, they spew affiliate cookies like confetti, and try to gather that revenue, and they sometimes "mirror" back to the actual advertiser network (taking one click on one ad and tell several networks it was a click on their ad)<p>And here is the sad bit, while its fraud, if the advertiser gets upset they go after the web site, if the web site is upset they go after the advertiser, if everyone starts yelling our fraudster just moves on with all the cash they have pocketed.