In the last episode of our show, we heard the story of Methbot: an army of hundreds of thousands of bots, programmatically viewing thousands of advertisements on thousands of made-up websites in order to siphon away millions of dollars worth of ad revenue. But even the giant Methbot scam was just a drop in the ocean that is ad fraud. Putting Zhukov in jail made hardly any difference at all, because of how many other people just like him are still out there today.

What makes ad fraud so successful, and so prevalent, and why can’t we stop it? The answer isn’t technical at all. It’s not hard to understand. But it’s a harsh reality that many people are simply not willing to face.

Except the deeper you look into it, the deeper the well goes. In this episode, we’ll learn how Aleksandr Zhukov defrauded some of the biggest American corporations for millions of dollars. And we’ll ask the question that hardly anyone else is willing to acknowledge: Was this clever, successful, guilty cybercriminal merely a fall guy for everybody else playing his twisted game?