Publication date:  15 March 2002

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Russia's criminal element has finally reached the Internet. And I don't mean those hackers who break into a site to post their pictures and signatures on the first page. The matter concerns genuine thieves who are doing their dirty business on the Net.

Almost every site displays banners, often several on one page. They are demonstrated by different banner exchange systems that include Russia's LBN, Interreklama, and RLE. The owner of the site displaying these systems' banners obtains the right to show them on other sites. Most take advantage of this right. Others try to sell their earned demonstrations or exchange them for something else. And this is no surprise to anyone, for banners on the Internet are a currency of everyday life, which differ in value and price. Everything depends on the kind of sites involved in the banner exchange network. The greater the quality, the more valuable the banner demonstrations in this network will be.

The market of banner showings is complete chaos at this point. There are no bosses and subordinates here, and no laws regulating banner traffic. Everything is based on an informal agreement between buyer and seller. If they can make a deal, then a transaction occurs; if they fail, then God is their judge.

The company I am referring to in particular had already accumulated 300,000 banner showings in the RLE network of the "Gold" category. Because the banners are highly praised on the secondary or "used" market, the company decided to sell them. They announced their sale and spent considerable time until a genuine client with a reasonable price emerged. This was due to the fact that banner prices had slumped in the post-New-Year period. Sellers accumulated too many shows, and it would not pay to sell them to the first casual buyer. The company had to wait for more paying terms of exchange. The "reasonable" buyer introduced himself as a representative of the Novosibirsk company AlphaNet.

After negotiating the price, the buyer suggested that the seller transfer demonstrations to the account of a certain Agava, a well-known company in the Internet community and a known player on the secondary banner market. And that was why the seller transferred the banner hits to the company without any hesitation. At the request of the buyer it also sent a system message of the RLE banner network, indicating the sum and date of the transfer. The buyer was given the address where the money exchange would take place. So far, so good.

But if only they knew in advance that everything would happen this way. The buyer shows Agava a statement of transfer, having obtained it in advance from the seller. Agava, meanwhile, has nothing to doubt: here are the banner showings, here is the check. In the end, the representatives of AlphaNet, the buyers, get the money.

Meanwhile, the sellers find themselves at the address where the money exchange was supposed to take place, and, as you may suppose, find no one to meet them. Their wonder-struck letters, asking "Where is our money?" went unanswered. After investigating on their own, the banner sellers learned that the buyer had obtained money from Agava using the "Webmoney" system. But this fact gave them no lead; instead their investigation met a dead end. The "Webmoney" system is anonymous as far as monetary transactions are concerned and never offers any information about its clients.

The handful of email addresses that they were able to obtain of the swindlers also came of no avail; an email address is not a residence permit in a passport, and it does not offer any significant information about a person.

There were other victims as well. It came to light that on January 19, 20 and 25, 2001 the same "reasonable clients" introduced themselves to potential sellers in St. Petersburg as the St. Petersburg AlphaNet branch office and gave the address of a company called Alpha. While Alpha really did exist in St. Petersburg, it had nothing to do with its "representatives," as it later turned out. Their tracks were found in Samara.

This organized group of frauds is still active today on the secondary market of banner showings. First they look for information about sellers and buyers. They use different bulletin boards and mail deliveries for this purpose. They select companies with years of good work and a decent reputation for "surrogates," then conceal their real intentions under the names of those "surrogates." Companies used in this way were Gidek in Moscow and Alpha in St. Petersburg.

But you can hardly blame a company like Agava, so craftily taken advantage of. They got the banners and paid whomever produced the proper claims. They could not know that they were paying for stolen property. Let's hope that this will be a good lesson to them, and they'll take greater care in identifying banner owners in the future.

The position of the RLE banner exchange network, however, raises greater doubts. Here is what the technical support service had to say to the complaints of the robbed seller: "The entire sale and purchase activity on the so-called secondary market concerns only the participants of the secondary sale market, while the support service has nothing to do with it..."

The cost of this lesson to the selling company was $165. But it's next to impossible to assess the total damage already inflicted by this group of swindlers, because most robbed companies are reluctant to disclose how they were duped on a market that's not even real, but called "virtual." Let this be a free lesson to all of us.

Translated from Russian by Igor Pospekhin,
edited by Anna Arutunyan

• This article in Russian

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