This guy made $28 million on eBay but never sold anything

His name is Shawn Hogan. In 2004, he created a free tool called Geo Visitors to show where blog visitors come from
This tool also hid a second job
Whenever someone opened a webpage with it installed, it would secretly insert an eBay tracking cookie into that person's browser. As long as that person bought anything from eBay within the next 30 days, Shawn could earn a commission
By 2006, this tool had planted 650k cookies
He alone took 15% of eBay's entire affiliate marketing budget, ranking first among 26,000 affiliate members
eBay even invited him to Las Vegas, treating him to caviar at the Alain Ducasse restaurant in Mandalay Bay Hotel, and gave him a private jet flight quota, which he actually used
He was so careful that he set the code not to implant cookies on computers near eBay's San Diego headquarters
Later, eBay launched a sting operation called Trip Wire. They placed an invisible 1-pixel image on the homepage to determine whether his referral traffic was genuinely from active shoppers. The results showed that 99% of his traffic was fake
The FBI raided his apartment. He admitted to a telecommunications fraud charge, was sentenced to 5 months in federal prison, and fined $25,000
eBay paid him $28 million, and in the end, he only paid a price of $25,000