[michaelbuckbee]

I'm curious if anyone has a sense for how much they made from this? I just don't have a good sense for scale and dimensions of this.

If it went undetected for so long they must not have been at least somewhat conservative in their approach, so say 5mil DAU times 1 click a day at $0.25/click. So, million-ish dollars a day?

[UseofWeapons1]

Per a Forbes article on the subject [0]

"Check Point estimated the firm was making millions from the ad clicks, in the region of $300,000 per month."

I imagine your price per click is over-estimated by a couple orders of magnitude, but that's just a guess.

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2017/05/26/googl...

[ChuckMcM]

somewhere between $250K - $400K a month seems to be the thoughts of various open sources on the matter. That would put it in the $3 - $5 million per year at its peak. Assuming their play took a while to ramp up maybe $25 million total?

Google makes more than $25B/year in revenue so even with a 30/70 payout (30 percent to the fraudsters) maybe .001% of Google's ad revenue?

And that is why people do this stuff. Other than getting booted off the store nothing else will happen to these people who just made tens of millions of dollars.

[H1Supreme]

So, this was an ad-referral click of some sort (article doesn't say)? AdWord clicks generate revenue for Google, not advertisers.

[bobsam]

FTA:

Upon clicking the ads, the malware author receives payment from the website developer, which pays for the illegitimate clicks and traffic