A Las Vegas web developer has been charged with fleecing eBay out of tens of
thousands of dollars by selling a program that planted fraudulent web cookies on
the PCs of people visiting the online auctioneer.
Dubbed saucekit, the program deposited a cookie on end users' hard drives
that contained a unique code identifying affiliate websites even though
advertisements from those sites were never viewed, according to documents filed
Tuesday in US District Court in San Jose, California. Users who went on to take
"revenue actions" on eBay would cause the affiliate to receive a referral fee it
was not entitled to.
