Google’s advertising platform, Google Ads (formerly known as Google Adwords), is used by millions of businesses across the world as part of their advertising and marketing arsenal. Why? Google Search and Ads deliver an 8:1 return on investment (ROI) — or $8 for every $1 spent.

The digital advertising industry depends on consumer clicks. In theory, the more ad clicks the better. 

There are no boundaries that scammers won’t cross to fraudulently cash out on ad revenue at the expense of advertisers. Just like there are good bots and bad bots, good proxy traffic and bad proxy traffic, fraudsters sabotage your ad campaigns with malicious iFrame traffic — a usually legitimate method of embedding one webpage into…

Fraudsters are well versed in mimicking real user behavior to bypass checks and balances. They’re also experts in identifying organizations’ advertising weak spots and exploiting them for financial gain. 

Although overall digital ad revenue is rising, ad fraud remains a widespread, insidious problem for the ad tech industry at large. Organizations are still plagued by illegitimate traffic and skewed metrics, while fraudsters easily seize sizable chunks of advertising revenue.  While there are many different ad fraud techniques, pixel stuffing is one of the easiest…

Android smartphone users have unrestricted access to around three million apps listed on Google’s Play Store. To the average user, all of these apps appear legitimate and safe to install for use on their devices. However, a dark side of the Play Store does exist — and, as of yet, it’s an issue that hasn’t…

What do you think of when you hear the word ‘bot’? Nine times out of ten, your mind is probably drawn to the malicious botnets or bots that eat your ad budget and plague the digital advertising industry at large.

Wherever there’s money to be made, you’ll find fraudsters, too. If you work in the digital advertising industry, you’ll likely have been left frustrated by what seems like a never-ending stream of fraudulent attacks on your efforts.

What is ad fraud and how does it work? Ad fraud is the practice of generating false interactions with any digital asset for the sole purpose of earning money. Ad fraud isn’t just conducted by humans (e.g. click farms) or malicious bots, there is a wide range of high-tech methods fraud organizations practice to capitalize…

According to Juniper Research, online ad spend lost to ad fraud will amount to $100 billion world wide by 2023.