A California man has been charged with extortion, after allegedly making demands for $100,000 from search giant Google.
According to court papers, he claimed that if Google did not pay, he would release a piece of software to spammers that would generate fake advertising hits, costing the search giant millions.
The man, Michael Bradley, was so sure that the folks at Google would pay up, he even turned up at their offices for a meeting to sell his software. By then, federal law enforcement agents were already on the case and videotaped the alleged extortion attempt.
The software Bradley designed would have flooded the Google advertisements with fake clicks, potentially costing the company millions of dollars. Google pays Web publishers a fee for each click on the pop-ups the site generates. He threatened to give the software to the top 100 spammers in the meeting with Google's officials, court papers released on Friday show.
According to the papers, he also offered his services as a consultant engineer to help the search engine stop other advertising fraud.
News source: ZDNet
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