BuzzFeed's Craig Silverman covers the fraudulent traffic driving to Myspace and hundred's of local news sites with the help of the DV Fraud Lab. The focus on video ads in this scheme reinforces how important video has become for publishers — and how it can cause them to launch questionable products in the hunt for video impressions and revenue. Thanks to higher ad rates for video and an appetite for the format among brands, many publishers have enacted a so-called pivot to video strategy to capture the audience and ad dollars available. And so have fraud operations, according Wayne Gattinella, the CEO of DoubleVerify.

“Fraud follows the money. Video CPMs [cost per thousand impressions] are much higher than display, so [fraudsters are] clearly focused on where the larger dollars go,” he told BuzzFeed News. This particular fraud operation is designed “to capitalize on this incredible demand for video,” he said.

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