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So we're all aware of services like CoinAd, but what if someone took advantage of that? Imagine if someone had a video game on facebook or something and had people fill out a CAPTCHA before they could play... couldn't someone really just ajax a separate, custom server that curl'd coinAd, kept the session alive, passed the image generated by google to the user, have them fill it out, then pass the answer back to coinAd, and inserting their own BTC address? Couldn't someone decieve people into giving them a BTC charity?

I know it's "limited" to one address per hour per user or whatever, but if you played it smart, you could have thousands of addresses and make thousands of users with thousands of email addresses. You could even shard the servers around the world so that you won't have one ip address. Heck, I bet you could even put it on the user's own computer in an with display:none!

Although coinad's rate is only .00005 BTC (~1/1000th of $0.01), but if you get 20,000 users on your facebook game, you'd make $100.

What I'm saying is, is it illegal to take advantage of this (technically speaking) give-away? ;)

Highly Irregular
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Athan Clark
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  • It might be worth adding a locality to this question, if you're interested in a particular locality. After all, it's probably legal in some places and not others. – Highly Irregular Jan 28 '13 at 06:44

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If you were smart enough to set up the system you describe, you'd have far easier ways to earn $100!

Such activity would show up in statistics as a significant drop in ad clicks or similar measurements. If the operator of the site is canny, they could start to make regular (even automated) changes to the site design to make it tougher to parse. It's a cat and mouse game I guess in a similar way to malware and anti-malware software.

If you dropped the profitability of the site too much, I'm sure it would close.

This question discusses the legality of fraud relating to Bitcoin: Is performing a 51% attack / double spend on Bitcoin illegal?

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Highly Irregular
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    I think we'd call that fraud and CoinAd would put the kibosh on that as soon as they found out it was being done. – Colin Dean Jan 28 '13 at 01:51
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    There was a definition of fraud posted to Bitcoin.SE a while back, and it was quite general. I couldn't find it with a quick search unfortunately. Besides, I'm sure it differs by country, and international law gets murky and hard to enforce. Whether or not it this counts as fraud I don't know, but it would seem a pretty nasty thing to do to a business that has done no wrong. I stand by my comment that there are easier (and better) ways to earn $100! – Highly Irregular Jan 28 '13 at 02:04
  • Definitely, I agree haha, I just wanted to keep everyone on their toes. Thanks for the great answer :) – Athan Clark Jan 28 '13 at 16:39