Zhukov Alexander Mikhaylovich

Zhukov Alexander Mikhaylovich

Biography

2021:10 years in prison for online fraud

On November 10, 2021, the US Department of Justice announced the conviction of Alexander Zhukov for fraud on the Internet. The 41-year-old Russian was sentenced by an American court to 10 years in prison, and will also have to pay more than $3.8 million.

According to the investigation and the court, Alexander Zhukov, along with accomplices, seized $7 million, which he received from American advertisers, sites, publishers and other participants in the advertising industry. Receiving money for advertising on the network, the Russian placed it on fake pages, renting services located in Texas and the Netherlands for this, and using bots created the appearance of views by real users.

Bots were programmed to download real ads to empty sites, while domains were replaced by addresses of real large sites, including The New York Times, the New York Post, the New York Daily News, Newsday.

In addition, Zhukov rented more than 765,000 IP addresses, registering them with the names of large US Internet providers to create the impression that these computers belonged to real American users. To implement his scheme, the Russian hired programmers and other employees.

Sitting behind his keyboard in Bulgaria and Russia, Zhukov boldly developed and carried out a carefully thought-out multimillion-dollar fraud against the Digital Signage industry and pursued thousands of companies throughout the United States, the prosecutor's statement reports.

Zhukov  during the court hearings indicated that he did not   mislead clients. According  to him, he  did not  seek to hide the fact that advertising views were carried out  due to the activity of bots,  and only satisfied the requirements of customers who sought to increase the number of advertisement views on  their sites.^[1]

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