This guy made 28 million dollars on eBay without ever selling anything.

His name is Shawn Hogan and in 2004 he created a free widget called "Geo Visitors" that showed bloggers where their visitors came from.
The widget had a hidden function: every time someone landed on a page with it installed, it silently deposited an eBay tracking cookie in their browser.
If that person bought something on eBay within the next 30 days, Shawn would collect the commission.
By 2006, the widget had placed 650,000 cookies and he was taking 15% of eBay's total affiliate budget, becoming the number 1 affiliate among 26,000.
eBay flew him to Las Vegas, invited him to dine with caviar at Alain Ducasse’s restaurant in Mandalay Bay, and gave him credit for private jet flights that he used without hesitation.
He even took the precaution of programming his widget not to deposit cookies on computers near eBay’s headquarters in San Diego.
Finally, eBay created a trap called "Trip Wire": an invisible 1-pixel image on their homepage to check if their supposed referrals were actually making purchases.
It turned out that 99% of his traffic was fake.
The FBI raided his apartment. He pleaded guilty to an electronic fraud charge and received 5 months of federal prison and a $25,000 fine.
eBay had paid him 28 million dollars and only penalized him with 25,000.