Two Icelandic men charged with defrauding U.S. company of over half a million dollars

Two Icelandic men have been charged with defrauding a U.S. company of over half a million dollars over a three-year period, equivalent to approximately 72 million Icelandic krónur. According to the indictment, one of the men created three websites and registered them with a hosting service on wordpress.com, owned by Automattic Inc. One site featured posts about cute or funny animals, another was dedicated to women’s fashion, while the third contained an automatic post from the web developers about the first blog entry.

The man registered these websites with Automattic to generate advertisement revenue. The indictment states he received assistance from another individual employed by the company. Despite only the first website being approved in the company’s advertising system, all three sites were registered for monetization. Additionally, the employee is accused of falsifying data, enabling the site creator to claim advertisement revenue that was, in fact, unfounded.

This operation resulted in the other man receiving over half a million dollars into his PayPal account, which he shared with the Automattic employee. This fraudulent activity occurred from July 2015 to August 2018.

Both men face charges of fraud, with one additionally charged with complicity in the other’s offenses and the other with agency fraud. The case will be tried at the District Court of Reykjavík.