More than $15M retrieved from 3ve online fraud operation

BleepingComputer reports that more than $15 million of funds from the 3ve online advertising fraud scheme have been retrieved by the U.S. government following the issuance of the Final Order of Forfeiture related to the government's case against campaign co-conspirator Sergey Ovsyannikov. More than 1.7 million devices have been infected with the click-fraud Kovter botnet malware in the height of the 3ve campaign, which involved attackers to collaborate with advertisers and agencies in an effort to take a chunk out of their revenue. Over $29 million in ads have been fraudulently billed to advertisers by the operation between December 2015 and October 2018. "This forfeiture is the largest international cybercrime recovery in the history of the Eastern District of New York and sends a powerful message to those involved in cyber fraud that there are no boundaries to prosecuting these bad actors and locating their ill-gotten assets wherever they are in the world," said U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York Breon Peace.