We peek behind the curtain of banners and gimmicks that go too far
Digital ad fraud is potentially lucrative, difficult to detect, and getting worse.
“It is one of the biggest ways bad guys have of pulling money out of the online economy,” said Louis-David Mangin, co-founder and CEO of Confiant, a firm that helps publishers mitigate the damage done by hosting bad ads, in a phone interview with The Register. “It’s definitely getting worse.”
Augustine Fou, a cybersecurity and ad fraud researcher who advises companies about online marketing, makes a similar point in a report he plans to publish on Monday.
“Ad fraud is the most lucrative way to cash out of other major criminal activities,” his report, provided in advance to The Register, reads.
It’s nearly the perfect crime in the sense that it often goes unnoticed and hasn’t been as high a law enforcement priority as other online threats. Some industry experts talk about digital ad fraud as if it were legal, though they don’t really mean it.
Illegal, or is it
Fou has in the past claimed digital ad fraud is legal, and he says something similar in his latest findings.
“Ad fraud isn’t illegal (no laws pertain to it) but other laws may be broken in the committing of it,” his report says.
“Ad fraud is against the terms of service of most ad exchanges, so it’s almost certainly a breach of contract,” said Ratko Vidakovic, founder and principal consultant at AdProfs, ad tech consultancy based in Toronto, Canada, in an email to The Register.
“Then again, plausible deniability is always on the table, so it’s very hard to prove that a publisher is deliberately engaging in ad fraud without a rigorous investigation. To my knowledge, it’s not explicitly illegal. Although, I’m sure some could argue that it constitutes wire fraud, or violates any number of computer crime laws.”
While online ad fraud may not be specifically defined as a crime, it is nonetheless fraud, and is actionable at least under US law. What’s more, there are various statutes that can be brought to bear related to computer crimes, money laundering and the like, depending on the circumstances.
Asked about this, Fou said what he means is that digital ad fraud isn’t often prosecuted.
A tsunami of scams
Digital ad fraud can mean many different things. It can involve fake websites, fake online traffic, fake ads, fake ad agencies, fake audiences, fake ad bidding, fake accounts, fake devices, fake apps, and fake data.
It’s not just click fraud – bots clicking on ads or loading display ads to get paid. It may involve installation fraud, by which physical or virtual devices download and install apps, cycling through fake device identifiers to collect the installation payment from the app publisher. Or it may involve showing ads that paid to reach a high-value audience to a low-value audience.
AdProfs describes some of the variations:..
