fraud

A lot of F-bombs got dropped on stage at the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement’s (CIMM) summit in New York City earlier this week. And no, probably not the F-bomb you’re thinking of.

Ad verification company DoubleVerify recently shut down a new type of scheme in connected TV that uses screensavers to hijack streaming devices in order to generate fake ad impressions – even when the screen is off. DoubleVerify estimates that the scam, dubbed “SmokeScreen,” is bilking advertisers out of more than $6 million a month and […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. All For Me And None For … Thee? Apple’s new privacy restrictions in iOS 14 could give its own small but growing ad business an edge over rivals, The Wall Street Journal reports. For one thing, advertisers targeting iPhone users will get more data […]

Enterprise tech giant Oracle said it shut down the largest ad fraud scam in the connected TV space that bilked advertisers and publishers out of $14.5 million in ad spending. Oracle Moat – the company’s business that provides measurement and ad verification solutions across digital and TV – said the fraudsters exploited flaws in CTV […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. These Boots Were Made For Frauding There’s nothing more creative than … a fraudster. White Ops recently uncovered a scheme involving a family of Android apps that trick people into downloading them with the promise of free stuff. Starting in late 2019, the apps began showing […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. F Is For Fake Last year was a point of “inversion” for the Internet, which has become oversaturated with malicious nonhuman traffic, ad fraud, fake news, falsely reported metrics and other forms of digital unreality, according to a New York Magazine story. It was […]

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

Online retailers are losing revenue right under their noses thanks to a devious form of ad injection only visible to infected site visitors. “I didn’t even know we had a problem,” said Jason LeBoeuf, director of ecommerce at athletics footwear brand Asics. The Asics website was the victim of customer-journey hijacking, a sneaky practice by […]

While the online advertising trade groups have created anti-fraud programs and exchanges have instituted inventory standards, fraud is still on the rise. AdExchanger reached out to some of the people in the trenches about where the digital ad tech and media ecosystem stands now and how progress can be made. Click below for their responses. […]

WPP’s GroupM upended the industry’s mutual viewability standard back in 2014, when it promised to buy only 100% in-view ads for clients. Now it’s created an executive position to enforce that standard in all of its markets as well as to shield clients from a slew of other brand safety issues presented by digital advertising. […]

As fraudsters get smarter, anti-fraud players must evolve to put up a worthy fight. To scale its fraud detection capabilities, viewability and verification measurement vendor Integral Ad Science (IAS) has acquired bot detection company Swarm. Terms of the deal, which was announced Friday, were not disclosed. “Fraud is not going away, it’s getting more sophisticated,” […]

Advertisers don’t have a strong enough grip on the technological ecosystem to make informed buying decisions, agreed leaders of several leading ad organizations at AdExchanger’s Clean Ads IO conference. Panelists from the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), the American Association of Advertising Agencies (4A’s) and the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) got on stage in New […]

Blood in the water brings sharks, and high CPMs bring bots. And political spenders, who often outbid brands on targeted inventory, are uniquely vulnerable to digital fraud and bots. “All the ingredients that typically happen for fraud are a part of the political marketplace,” said Mark Schlosser, senior sales director at the ad fraud security […]

When Heineken moved more of its advertising budget to digital video, it didn’t see results. “Digital never rose to the top [in marketing mix models], in an almost mind-boggling way,” said Ron Amram, VP of media for Heineken USA. But Heineken knew its audience was moving to digital environments, so it didn’t want to leave […]

Best practices and policies to deal with fraud and botnets are emerging, but ad tech companies aren’t sharing them with each other – partially because they don’t want their secrets to slip out to fraudsters, and partially because ad fraud detection is a competitive differentiator. As a result, companies are developing their own policies and […]

AskMen is firmly in the pro-platform camp among publishers. The men’s website, born during the dot-com boom, now looks to platforms, not SEO, as a way to gain audience and increase recognition. The king of those platforms is Facebook, where video posts earn the publisher millions of views. AskMen, which is owned by Ziff Davis, […]

There are myriad reasons why location data can be defective – and fraud is just one small piece of that growing problem. Growing because the lack of industry standards around the collection and use of location data leads to a fair amount of misunderstanding, unintentional discrepancies and widespread inaccuracy. “Location fraud is the easy part,” said […]

The Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG), which is uniting industry players to root out criminal activity in digital advertising, has unveiled a pilot program to block fraudulent traffic coming from data centers. Google proposed the data center project and is leading the pilot program, which will see member companies sharing intelligence about fraudulent data centers. The companies […]

Two months into a quality control effort designed to curb fraud, domain masking and other sketchy practices in its marketplace, AppNexus has offered some details on those cleanup efforts – and even given them a name. The company’s supply hygiene initiative, dubbed IQ, consists of three measures aimed at boosting transparency and accountability of media sold […]

Wayne Gattinella, CEO of DoubleVerify, will appear at AdExchanger’s CleanAds I/O conference on June 3, an event addressing inventory quality and supply chain issues in the digital advertising ecosystem. Because of the high demand for mobile location-based data, it’s a big opportunity for fraudsters looking to game geo-coordinates. “With more money flowing to place-based advertising, […]

ZenithOptimedia Chief Investment Officer John Nitti will be a speaker at AdExchanger’s CleanAds I/O conference on June 3, an event examining issues and solutions around fraudulent inventory in the online advertising ecosystem. Clients hold their agencies accountable when they run campaigns heavy on fraudulent traffic or misrepresented inventory. While ZenithOptimedia, part of Publicis, understands that […]

The Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG), a group created by the IAB, ANA and 4As late last year, have announced the creation of a Fraud Threat List through which members will share URLs they consider fraudulent to create a master blacklist. “We are developing a registration program to create a safe zone for the digital advertising […]

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

Six months after it came to light that AppNexus has a problem with invalid inventory, the New York-based company is imposing more transparency on ad networks and websites that use its platform to sell media. AppNexus confirmed to AdExchanger that it has started inserting a new snippet of JavaScript into its ad tag in order to […]

Many publishers don’t know – or don’t want to know – what kind of fraud occurs on their sites. But it’s a reaction not dissimilar to how brands approached fraud before shocking numbers – like the 17% of programmatic ads and 23% of video ads determined fraudulent in the ANA/White Ops study last year – […]

All of La Quinta Inns & Suites’ 2015 insertion orders specify that it will pay for human traffic only. “As a brand that strives to do the most with our resources, and as a challenger brand in the space, it matters when our media dollars aren’t going to real people,” La Quinta director of media […]

  The rise of automation has made the ad-buying and selling process more informed and efficient, but it’s also provided an outlet for fraudsters to profit. After all, if machines conduct more transactions that used to take place between two humans over the phone, there’s less human oversight. Additionally, ad ops teams, excited by the […]

Media buyers and suppliers are now authorized to transact on viewable impressions, but how many are even using this form of tracking? To measure the adoption of viewability tracking and other forms of verification among national and global advertisers, AdExchanger recently worked with ad analytics firm Moat. We supplied Moat with a list of 100 […]

As fraudsters swarm like so many bees at the display advertising picnic, the industry is trying to blunt their stings with a combination of automated and manual solutions. Google has been among the most proactive ad platform players, hiring legions of real humans to review websites submitted to DoubleClick Ad Exchange. It recently acquired Spider.io, a […]

Last month AdExchanger reported on plans by AppNexus to roll out a “Certified Supply” stamp of approval for demonstrably valid impressions, and thereby cut off the flow of spend to impressions that are fraudulent, nonviewable or otherwise undesirable. The certified program came amid growing industry concerns about the persistence of fraud in the AppNexus supply. […]