A display campaign promoting Suzuki that ran across several Gawker Media websites last week had all the markings of a legitimate ad campaign. The representatives requesting the campaign said they were from Spark SMG, part of Publicis Groupe, and spoke as if they had industry knowledge. It was only after the ads started installing malware on visitors' computers that Gawker realized it had been duped.
As it turns out, the campaign buyers were not employees of Spark at all. They were scammers posing as agency representatives in order to deceive the publisher, an alarming tactic that is on the rise, according to Ad Age.
Spammers are now targeting ad networks to distribute ads containing malicious code, while some are even boldly selling the bogus campaigns directly to a website's sales force, according to the report. The fakers are using what appear to be reputable email addresses, and their ads often don't affect every consumer that visits a page, making it even harder to detect the malicious ads.
When scammers posing as agency reps contact publishers, they usually say they have to spend a certain amount of budget very quickly to increase impressions before a deadline, as was the case with the Gawker scam.
