ICYMI - Click Fraud, Crypto Miners, and Rage Bait: The Bot Economy

The bot takeover of the web is not one thing. Greg Fish of Cyberpunk Survival Guide breaks it into parts. Scrapers steal content, fill it with ads, and send bots to click the ads. That is click fraud and it funds a significant slice of what looks like web traffic. North Korea runs distributed crypto mining scripts that install through browsers and run silently while users are on a page. The country makes millions this way. State actors in other jurisdictions run automated dial-out scripts through VoIP vulnerabilities to generate billable long-distance traffic. Political operators use bots to amplify rage bait content until algorithms push it into human feeds. The bots are not random. They are infrastructure. Fish says the solution requires regulation with real jurisdictional teeth and a fundamental rethink of advertising as the financial engine of the web. Topics: bot takeover web, click fraud, North Korea crypto mining, web scrapers, rage bait amplification GUEST: Greg Fish | cyberpunksurvivalguide.com Originally aired on 2026-04-29