Last night 60 Minutes did a piece on fake news — “What’s ‘fake news’? 60 Minutes producers investigate.” An example was shown of “bots” being used to inflate the popularity of an online comment or posting on social media. Well, the same trick is used by criminals for ads, as noted in this Malwarebytes blog article.
Adware: any software application that shows advertisements while one of the components of the adware is running. The word is a contraction of advertising and software and often just regarded as “advertising-supported free-ware.”
Ad fraud: a type of fraud that lets advertisers pay for advertisements even though the number of impressions (the times that the advertisement has been seen) is enormously exaggerated.
Read the article for more details.