98,000 Malicious Android Apps and 43 Million Infected Devices in 20 Countries 93 percent of total mobile transactions in 20 countries were blocked as fraudulent in 2019 according to a report on the state of malware and mobile ad fraud released by mobile technology company, Upstream. The “Invisible Digital Threat” data is based on deployments of Upstream’s Secure-D full-stack anti-fraud platform that detects and blocks fraudulent mobile transactions mostly originated from ad fraud malware. The platform at the end of 2019…

Brands continue to pour more and more billions of dollars into digital advertising campaigns – nearly all of which are visually designed and/or wordsmithed to compel consumers to click. Research by AppNexus finds that advertisers in the US. spent nearly $100 billion on digital ads in 2018, and projects that digital ad spend will surpass offline ad spend by the end of 2020. Naturally, criminals willing to engage in fraudulent behavior are eager for their own piece of this gigantic pie. A report by The&Partnership…

Limpid, the data-driven advertising technology platform, announced today it has been “Verified by TAG” and approved for listing in the TAG Registry of known and trusted players in the digital ad ecosystem TAG is an advertising initiative created to fight criminal activity across the digital advertising supply chain and provides a variety of certifications and resources to support this goal. Also Read: 75 Inspiring Martech Leaders Who Are Prepared for 2020 The TAG Registry is enabling companies to feel confident that…

What happens when you ignore a crime that you perceive as victimless? Brands are writing off the monetary losses of ad fraud as a cost of doing business, but is there another reason to take fraud prevention seriously? Why are lawmakers like Senator Mark Warner in the US slowly turning their attention to ad fraud, and what’s really at stake when $19Bn/year goes missing? To help understand the significance of funds going missing with no apparent harm done, think back to a time when money laundering - the process of…

While some within the industry might have previously brushed off ad fraud as an annoying itch, everyone from advertisers to agencies and ad networks are starting to come to grips with the immense threat it poses. With estimates of ad fraud in 2019 set to total $18.7 billion in North America - 36% of estimated global loss, it’s not hard to see why. Discoveries of high profile fraud operations and litigation have been coming in hard and fast, and from major household brands to boot. For example, Uber recently filed lawsuits…

Ad Tech startup tribeOS co-founder Matt Gallant releases proprietary online tool that instantly reveals the damage ad fraud causes in real time Digital ad fraud is the second most profitable organized crime next to drug trafficking. The theft is invisible. Digital advertisers have no way of knowing which ads were feasted on by bots instead of being seen by live human beings. Research has shown that a whopping 77% of display ads are never seen and more than half (52%) of web traffic is not generated by humans.…

Ad fraud continues to be a thorn in the side of digital advertisers, as bot traffic and fraudulent human activity falsely inflates ad statistics. Such activity forces unwitting brands to shell out for clicks or impressions that have no hope of reaching – let alone converting – potential customers. A recent study by White Ops and the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) finds that advertisers lost around $5.8 billion to ad fraud last year. On the brighter side, the study also found that efforts to defeat ad fraud – using…

Ad fraud is a plague on the industry, with some estimating that as much as 30% of advertising goes unseen by consumers or roughly 21,000 trillion ads. This year alone, fraudulent advertising is expected to cost businesses $23 billion, money that’s essentially wasted on bots and fraudsters. Unfortunately, fraud has become such a pervasive problem that many marketers just chalk it up to the cost of doing business. They even plan for it in their budgets, opting to take the lower-cost buy, knowing that nearly 20% of it could be…

Bidstack Group, the in-game advertising group, announced the acquisition of ad fraud prevention platform Pubguard. The move is designed to protect all of Bidstack’s gaming inventory by removing fraudulent ads and will help guarantee advertisers a brand safe environment to run their campaigns. Pubguard has built proprietary technology that automatically reviews creatives served in-app and on mobile web and desktop web to identify offensive, malicious, illegal ad content, and malware which can be blocked at a client’s…

CEO Matt Gallant of Ad Tech Startup tribeOS Says the Time is Now for a Fully Transparent Advertising Marketplace  Digital advertising is in full on growth mode across two trend-driven tracks. First, the continued growth of digital advertising which is estimated to top $348 billion dollars by the end of 2022. (That figure will nearly double what is spent on TV advertising.) Unfortunately, accompanying this proven market momentum is a corresponding increase in the largest invisible crime in the world, costing…

TrafficGuard and Juniper Research estimates that within the next five years, advertisers will be losing $100 million a day due to ad fraud. In a latest announcement,  Ad fraud prevention specialist TrafficGuard explained the current state of ad fraud in North America. North America is the largest digital advertising market in the world. And therefore, it is most prone to all kinds of digital ad fraud. According to TrafficGuard, North America's average ad spend per internet user is 455% above the global average. However,…

Consortium Releases White Paper With Extensive Insights From The Hershey Company, Reprise/IPG Mediabrands, Hearst Television, MadHive, and Beachfront Media AdLedger, the non-profit research and development consortium building and implementing the blockchain and cryptography standards for digital media, today announced a collaborative white paper on fraud in the OTT ecosystem. The report features extensive insights from MadHive, Reprise/IPG Mediabrands, Hearst Television, The Hershey Company and Beachfront Media. “OTT…

Ad Tech Firm Unveils Ambitious Plans to Tackle Ad Fraud in an End-To-End Platform With Blockchain at Its Core AdsDax, an advertising technology provider, has revealed more details about their live platform which, they believe, can solve some of the massive challenges currently presented by fraud and attribution within the ad industry. Digital advertising is currently experiencing rapid growth, with eMarketer recently predicting that digital ad spending will reach over $427 billion by 2022. With such a massive amount of…

Marketers are expected to lose $23 billion this year in online ad spending because of ad fraud, a global economic study by CHEQ has revealed. The military-grade cybersecurity company commissioned a report about the full scale of ad fraud, undertaken with economist Roberto Cavazos, a professor at the University of Baltimore, using the latest economic analysis, proprietary CHEQ data, and expert interviews. The report finds that while direct global economic costs of ad fraud are conservatively placed at $23 billion, indirect…

Beta Program Identifies Nearly 100% of Programmatic Media Below Bid Floor Pricing is Fraudulent Mobiquity Technologies, Inc., a leading technology provider in next generation programmatic advertising released the initial observations from the Advangelists free AdCop beta program, exposing near 100% fraud in instances of bids placed below publishers' established floor price. Similar to a reserve bid price on eBay or other auction environments, all advertiser bids below the floor price should be rejected and the…

Ad fraud impacts real people with real lives, sometimes putting them in mortal danger, and we should be paying more attention to this reality. We typically think of ad fraud as click spamming, SDK spoofing, device farms, and bots delivering fake impressions—stuff that causes brands to lose money (lots of it), but ad fraud can be much more nefarious. Brands are often construed as the main victims of ad fraud because they have the largest at stake. No doubt, this is a giant issue and one that, in full disclosure, my company…

Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) Certifies Mobile Advertising Marketplace for Second Year in a Row AdColony, the mobile performance marketplace, announced that the Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) has awarded the company a 2019 Certified Against Fraud seal. For the second year in a row, AdColony is part of a group of media and advertising companies that have met the stringent requirements designed to protect advertisers, publishers, technology providers and consumers from digital ad fraud. “Digital ad fraud…

The Mobile Marketing industry has never been bigger, with ad spend predicted to reach $232.34 billion in 2019, according to eMarketer. But ad fraud remains a black mark on the sector. As Adjust’s fraud prevention filters reject around one million fraudulent activities a day, we strongly believe that fraud should be every growth marketer’s priority going into 2019. Without maintaining a strong view of the problem, finding the solution becomes much harder. Before we begin, let’s answer the basics: What exactly is ad…

Millions of Consumer Devices May Be Infected; Apps Can Drain 10GB Data/Month; Joint Work of Teams from Oracle’s Moat and Dyn Acquisitions Led to Discovery Oracle announced the discovery of and mitigation steps for “DrainerBot,” a major mobile ad fraud operation distributed through millions of downloads of infected consumer apps. Infected apps can consume more than 10GB of data per month downloading hidden and unseen video ads, potentially costing each device owner a hundred dollars per year or more in data overage…

77% of Marketers Know Ad Fraud Exists Yet Only 20% Believe Their Campaigns are Affected Ad fraud is not Bigfoot. Proof of it actually exists. The numbers don't lie. Even so, global industry statistics like $51 million a day stolen from digital ad programs often fall on deaf ears with even the most savvy marketers. This urgent message of ad fraud robbery isn't because marketers are unaware. Marketers do know about ad fraud from bot farms and domain spoofing, but the majority can't define (or even measure) what those are…