Unmasking the many faces of mobile ad fraud

Created on 2023/01/14 • 15,581 views • 3 minutes read

Tackling Mobile Ad Fraud: Strategies and Solutions

In mobile marketing, every penny counts. Marketers are already juggling tight budgets, trying to spread them across various channels and strategies to beat the competition. The last thing you need is for your strategic ad spend to end up in the hands of fraudsters. Dealing with mobile ad fraud is a challenge we must tackle head-on, requiring smart strategies to detect and avoid fraud so you can focus on connecting with your audience and boosting your brand.

What is Ad Fraud?

Ad fraud involves deceptive practices where cybercriminals manipulate advertisements for financial gain by falsifying impressions, clicks, and conversions. Essentially, ad fraud aims to exploit digital advertising ecosystems for financial gain, undermining the integrity of online marketing efforts and causing significant losses to advertisers. For mobile marketers, this means spending money on ads that aren't seen or interacted with by actual people, much like selling out a concert only to find half the seats are filled with mannequins instead of real fans.

How Does Ad Fraud Work?

Scammers use various tactics to simulate real user activity on advertising platforms, creating the illusion of genuine engagement. This can be done manually by humans or through automated software programs known as bots.

Human Ad Fraud: This involves individuals, often at install farms, creating fake ad engagements. They click on ads and install apps to generate activity for which they will be paid. The process can be repeated with different IP addresses to simulate many users installing an app.
Bot Ad Fraud: Bots mimic human behavior online, generating large volumes of fraudulent engagements without actual human interaction. This allows fraudsters to operate on a massive scale, significantly skewing performance data.

Core Types of Ad Fraud

Fraudsters use various approaches to exploit the online advertising ecosystem. Here are two primary tactics along with their subsets:

Fake Engagements (Clicks)Click Spam (Click Flooding): Fraudsters execute fake clicks on ads without the user's knowledge, consent, or intent. This can happen when a user clicks on an ad and is redirected to a fraudster's page where invisible clicks occur in the background.Cookie Stuffing: Fraudsters add code to a user’s browser to falsely attribute clicks to an affiliated partner.Ad Stacking: Multiple ads are layered within a single ad slot, generating clicks for each ad, even though only the top ad is visible to the user.Click Injection: Specific to Android, fraudsters trigger a false engagement just before an app install completes to claim credit for the install. This exploits Android’s broadcast system designed to improve app connectivity and user experience.
Click Spam (Click Flooding): Fraudsters execute fake clicks on ads without the user's knowledge, consent, or intent. This can happen when a user clicks on an ad and is redirected to a fraudster's page where invisible clicks occur in the background.Cookie Stuffing: Fraudsters add code to a user’s browser to falsely attribute clicks to an affiliated partner.Ad Stacking: Multiple ads are layered within a single ad slot, generating clicks for each ad, even though only the top ad is visible to the user.
Cookie Stuffing: Fraudsters add code to a user’s browser to falsely attribute clicks to an affiliated partner.
Ad Stacking: Multiple ads are layered within a single ad slot, generating clicks for each ad, even though only the top ad is visible to the user.
Click Injection: Specific to Android, fraudsters trigger a false engagement just before an app install completes to claim credit for the install. This exploits Android’s broadcast system designed to improve app connectivity and user experience.
Fake InstallsSDK Spoofing: Fraudsters create fake installs using real device data through a 'man-in-the-middle' attack. They intercept SSL encryption between a tracking SDK and its backend servers, generating fake installs by manipulating URL calls representing in-app actions.
SDK Spoofing: Fraudsters create fake installs using real device data through a 'man-in-the-middle' attack. They intercept SSL encryption between a tracking SDK and its backend servers, generating fake installs by manipulating URL calls representing in-app actions.

Preventing Ad Fraud with Trackscouting

Understanding campaign performance and identifying high-value users are crucial, but ad fraud can obscure these insights. Addressing ad fraud involves two approaches:

Reactive Detection: Identifies fraud after it has occurred, allowing for accurate campaign performance assessment.
Proactive Protection: Prevents fraud before it happens, ensuring campaign data remains reliable and undistorted.

Trackscouting's Fraud Prevention solutions provide both reactive and proactive measures. They reject fraudulent installs in real-time, enabling confident campaign analysis with accurate data.

To learn more about the intricacies of these ad fraud approaches and proactive solutions, you can refer to Trackscouting's resources and their ebook: The Trackscouting Guide to Mobile Ad Fraud.