There’s a new cyber crime in town, and in ways it’s bigger and badder than identity theft and credit card fraud. Ad fraud is the sophisticated new way fraudsters make money online — lots of it. Advertisers will lose an estimated $7.2 billion to ad fraud this year — that is unless Tamer Hassan, cofounder and CTO of White Ops, Inc. can find a way to preempt that projection.

Tamer spoke to Jeff Frick and George Gilbert, coshots of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, about this new activity and why it’s so attractive to criminals.

“It’s one of the few recurring revenue models for cyber crime,” he said, adding that it’s drawn a lot of action away from identity and credit card fraud. It involves getting bots that can’t be differentiated online from humans to view pages and then finding multiple avenues to getting advertisers to pay for those views. One way is to set up a blog for free, get bots to generate tons of views for the site and then show those views to advertisers in a bid to get them to pay to advertise on the site.

Big Data beats the bad guys

Tamer said that White Ops is using the most cutting-edge technology possible to track and stamp out “all the crazy things bots do to game the system.” The company has generic detection models for all customers, but, “What gets custom sometimes is the reporting and data feeds, and that’s where Spark comes in and is very powerful,” he said.

Watch the full video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Spark Summit East 2016. And join in on the conversation by CrowdChatting with theCUBE hosts.

Photo by SiliconANGLE