advertising fraud

A weekly comic strip from AdExchanger.com that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem…

Until now, if an ad fraud scam was uncovered, the criminals behind it would usually fade back into the shadows with impunity, and shortly thereafter, they’d be back at it again – the seemingly eternal game of Whac-A-Mole. This time, there’s accountability. Two global botnets, Methbot and 3ve, are no more, and there are real people […]

Meet Methbot, the Russian hacking operation that’s costing advertisers between $3 million and $5 million a day. At the very least, that’s a little over $1 billion a year – a hefty chunk of the ad industry’s estimated $7.2 billion annual ad fraud problem. White Ops first uncovered the browser-based botnet in September 2015, when it […]

Google is upping its defenses against ad fraud to take on three malware families. The offenders include Bedep, plus two previously unknown entities internally code-named Beetal and Changthangi, which are named for goat species. Read the blog post. Google has developed a filter – now available for advertisers using DoubleClick Bid Manager (DBM) and Google Display […]

Advertisers in India have become addicted to cheap clicks. “But it shouldn’t just about installs. It should be someone actually converting inside an app,” said Deepak Abbot, head of mobile growth at Times Internet, the digital product arm of Indian media titan Times India Group. Times Internet houses a host of apps that run the […]

Bots are slipping through the cracks. Digital security company Are You a Human claims to have identified a number of bots for sale in traffic that’s already been filtered by well-known verification companies. “The bots we saw through ad units were both on the open exchange and through direct DSP relationships,” said Reid Tatoris, COO […]

2014 was the year advertisers collectively asked the question, “How much?” As in, viewability aside, how much ad fraud is actually out there? Some of the numbers bandied about, often by the fraud vendors themselves, were alarming to say the least. A report released by cyber-security startup MdotLabs in October 2013 before it was acquired […]

Linda Woolley wants TAG to have teeth in the fight against online ad fraud. The Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) is part of a cross-industry coalition composed of the American Association of Advertising Agencies, the Association of National Advertisers (which launched its own anti-fraud initiative with White Ops in July), and the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB). […]

This is the 12th and final installment in a series of interviews with vendors combating the problem of ad fraud. Read previous interviews with comScore, DoubleVerify, Dstillery, Forensiq, Integral Ad Science, Moat, PubChecker, RTB Asia, Telemetry, Videology and White Ops. Wasted delivery is not necessarily fraud – but all fraud is wasted delivery. In other […]

This is the seventh in a series of interviews with vendors combating the problem of ad fraud. Other companies participating in this series include Moat, Telemetry, Sizmek, comScore and Asia RTB. Read previous interviews with DoubleVerify, Forensiq, Integral Ad Science, PubChecker, Videology and White Ops. The battle against botnets is ongoing. Ad tech firm Dstillery […]