Internet robots are hijacking computers to create fake Web traffic. It might sound like the plot of a sci-fi movie, but for one Pasadena company, it’s a problem that costs advertisers millions.

The company, OpenX, is an ad exchange, a marketplace for advertisers and publishers to buy and sell Web ads. Last month, it rolled out a system that monitors a publisher’s traffic and quickly pinpoints and weeds out fake impressions or Web visits by “bots” run by cyberscammers.

“We think it’s the responsibility of the exchange, of whoever is representing the inventory, to provide a marketplace with high levels of integrity,” said John Murphy, vice president of marketplace quality at OpenX. “It’s not a value-added service but built into the system.”

Most advertisers pay for a Web ad based on the amount of traffic it gets. Bot software can infect a consumer’s computer, causing it to visit multiple websites at a time, inflating visits and thereby costs.

Publishers buy services to boost their traffic and they profit when the higher statistics result in more ad revenue. Some of those services use bots, according to OpenX and industry experts.

Bots have been an ongoing problem for the digital ad industry, but advertisers began to complain about them to OpenX about 18 months ago. In response, the company assembled a team of 10 to research and develop algorithms to identify bot traffic in real time.

Even though the company will lose revenue because some publishers will be blocked, it’s important to maintain the integrity of the system, executives said.

“Our fundamental belief is that this will engender a much deeper level of trust with the buy-side community and, ultimately, they will end up spending more,” said Qasim Saifee, OpenX’s senior vice president of monetization platform.

Intermediary service

OpenX, which started in 2008, has a staff of more than 300 with offices in New York, London, Tokyo and Munich. The executives won’t disclose clients, but said the firm serves the biggest ad buyers and major media publishers.

The company has grown into one of the largest ad exchanges, competing with DoubleClick, run by Google Inc.; Right Media, run by Yahoo Inc.; and Microsoft Advertising Exchange run by Microsoft Corp.

OpenX is just one of a handful of ad exchanges that operates as a standalone company.

Ad exchanges run as an intermediary between publishers and advertisers. A publisher representing thousands of individual websites will come to an exchange to sell its advertising inventory.

The inventory is auctioned with multiple advertisers responding with competing bids. The advertiser willing to pay the highest price gets to fill the ad space. The process is automated and instantaneous.

“It’s happening in under 20 milliseconds across billions of transactions a day,” Murphy said.

As these automated auctions take place, where do bots enter the equation?

It can begin from the consumer, said Steve Sullivan, vice president of ad technology for New York-based trade organization Interactive Advertising Bureau.

Cyberscammers will create a bot net, or a network of consumers’ computers infected with bad software. As a consumer visits a website, his or her computer is rigged to visit five other Web pages without the consumer’s knowledge. These visits create a commodity for bot nets, publishers and advertisers.

The cyberscammers, who can operate from anywhere in the world, will sell the fake impressions to publishers eager to have lots of traffic.

“Bot controllers do it in such a sophisticated way that utilizes real people’s computers that it makes it look like real traffic,” Sullivan said.

Solve Media, an internet ad and security firm in New York, estimates the global advertising industry is expected to waste up to $9.5 billion this year to bot traffic.

Sullivan said the key to combating the problem is through the exchanges because almost all publishers and advertisers buy and sell ads through an ad exchange.

“You can ask … millions of different parties to do their own filtration (of bot traffic) or you can ask the five exchanges to do filtration and to do it really well,” he said.

OpenX had long used a system to filter out publishers with so many ads that bot traffic was suspected. Adult entertainment and gambling websites are not allowed to enter the marketplace.

If an existing publisher is suspected of having bot traffic, OpenX will work to resolve the issue with it or kick it out of the exchange. The new system is a second layer of defense.

Mark Pearlstein, senior vice president of sales and marketing at DoubleVerify, said there are several types of Internet fraud and bot traffic makes up only one piece.

DoubleVerify, a third-party audience verification firm in New York, works in the digital advertising space and has been using real-time monitoring in all of its fraud detection services such as bot traffic, Pearlstein said.

“While I applaud OpenX, we have been using real time in this space for a long time and the industry as a whole is really moving towards a real-time model, as it should,” he said.