I found out that fella made close to 6K Pounds a week by hijacking traffic from some highly populated German Shopping Portals. Looking at the portals closely, I found that these portals were infested with  advanced DOM iFrame and the innocent creditcard-ready traffic was actually visiting the iFramed sites instead of the original shopping site.

The iFramed sites were mostly Amazon & eBay shops which were being used to bait traffic. So while the visitors thought they were shopping on these credible portals they were actually doing transactions on spammed sites.

Here is a short excerpt from the chat:-
Hijacker - we have a huge networks of sites accross germany that we get our traffic from
Us - Ok you own them?
Hijacker - well, its a bit complicated, kind of involves some flash programming/javascirpt and server side app
Hijacker - since we have loads of sources / sites, we have built a system to control traffic
Hijacker - we dont want a ban hammer on a UG that took us 5k euros to establish
Hijacker - UG = a company
Hijacker - the php side of things server side is done by on partner of mine, the guy is a cryptography graduate & hes php nerd
Hijacker - I take care of the flash/js + development of the sites, and we have another 3 that do the admin part of stuff, phone calls to aff manages, etc
Us - I see
Hijacker - Im always looking for new revenue possibilities
Us - so in a way you hijack traffic? lol
Hijacker - hehehhe yea in a sense, yes
Us – I see, but IMHO, this traffic wouldnt convert much?
Hijacker - well to be honest, the conversion rates are low, but the way we have setup, we have been getting paid for over a year…also traffic amount is huge, doing about 3-4k clicks per day per program
Hijacker - so it adds up quite a bit, I make close to 6K pounds per week from some UK hosted programs.
Us - well I am surprised how u can make such huge loads from such non-commited traffic, really!!
Hijacker - and these people are buying stuff at ebay and amazon, 5k clicks a day will bring u 3k a month (euro)
Hijacker - I have reports for over a year that proves all of it
Us - can you get US traffic too?
Hijacker - why would u need? 95% of our traffic is german….
Us - I am thinking of reselling it. How much does it cost?
Hijacker - well, right now, traffic is hijacked from a load of sites, theres no filtering at all
Hijacker - they are all german based. its great for Alexa though
Hijacker – brb

The hijacker also revealed German websites which he was using to bait traffic and by looking at the website, no one could tell that there is an iFrame injected in the website. Alexa rank of these websites were within 600 and I am sure that even if 2% off the traffic converted, the smart-asses would be making close to seven or eight grands a week.

At Stanford, there has been several studies regarding iFrame hijacking and you may very often see websites which are restricted by Google when you try visiting these websites by clicking on Search Engine Results…

Similarly, there were several other University websites which still appear on top of search engines when searching for the keyword “Buy Viagra Online” which include University of dakota’s Chidren department, Chemistry department, Univeristy of Miami (law school), Truett Mcconell College, Southern Illinois University, Children’s Mental Health Awareness Week website and several other’s appeared on the Search Engines.

These pages were set to FOOL the Google robot and it seems that there is some serverside cloaking done on these university websites to redirect the users to Fly-By-Night pharmacies. The strange thing about this redirect was that when we tried accessing these domains by visiting the Original Websites, the pages seemed to fuction normal, but when we tried clicking on Google Search Engine results, these pages redirected us to the Viagra Pharmacies. A few websites didn’t even had the redirect set properly & showed a sign of “Please Stand By” JPG image. It seemed like nasty work of serverside hacking along with Xrumer link building tricks to spam the Search Engines.

A Google Custom search on Ohio Wesleyan University site also showed that their chemistry subdomain was hacked by spammers and they made these subdomains redirect to their Online Pharmacies.

Some other websites included, World Moment For Global Democracy – www.wmgd.net website. All these websites have been appearing on the Search Engine since long now and questions Google’s Caffeine upgrade which was designed to index out the spam results faster than ever.

With the hacking and cloaking done on these reputable website’s server, there is not much that Google could do, but Google’s organic spam filter experts and Matt Cutt’s Spam Buster team ought to check this out.