Welcome to the Tech Meme Right Home for Wednesday, November 28th, 2018.

I'm Brian McCullough. Today, the biggest ad fraud ever?

Amazon gets into medical records, Project Phi comes to iPhones,

one of Elon's LA tunnels is cancelled,

and the Big Mouth Billy Bass enters the 21st century. Here's what you missed today in the world of

tech. But by the way, I'm sure you might have noticed our little feed snafu yesterday. If you missed yesterday's episode it is available so

please check your podcast feed and download Tuesday's episode since most likely you missed it. Apologies for that and I'll explain at the end of the show.

Are you in the mood for a riveting sort of crime story straight out of the movies?

Late yesterday, Buzzfeed published the play-by-play of the FBI's biggest ad fraud

investigation ever, which resulted in Justice Department indictments of

eight people on charges related to a global ad fraud scheme that was discovered with the help of

around 15 tech companies, including Google and White Ops.

The indictments came down yesterday and in them the government alleges that the eight men

indicted stole tens of millions of dollars by using quote sophisticated computer programming and

infrastructure around the world to exploit the digital advertising

industry through fraud. Three of the men indicted have been arrested and are

awaiting extradition to the US, the remaining five remain at large.

What kind of fraud are we talking about here?

Well if you've ever bought online advertising you've probably had the thought how do I know the

clicks are real how do I know the page views are real I mean how hard could it be to

set up bots to act like real people and spend my ad dollars without real people ever actually seeing my ad.

All of the online advertisers swear up and down that they have complicated systems in place to prevent this.

...