Practical Fraud Prevention

Chapter 23. Adtech Fraud

Bots! Bots everywhere!

Lil Robotussin¹

Note

Full disclosure: Gilit Saporta, the author of this chapter, currently acts as director of fraud analytics for DoubleVerify, a leader in measurement services for the advertising industry.

Adtech was a bit late to the game of online fraud. Fraud in this realm only began to flourish from the early 2010s, when it became obvious that the spend by advertisers was growing rapidly enough to make it really worthwhile for “top-notch” fraudsters to get in on the game. Its status in the world of fraud is still evolving, which is one of the reasons we have placed it within the compliance section. Whichever industry ad fraud belongs in, it’s certainly a compliance issue, in the sense of abusing terms and conditions and expected practice.

In addition to the high potential gain, many fraudsters have found that the relatively young ecosystem of adtech is vulnerable to manipulation. This is especially true if traffic is transacted through real-time bidding (RTB), also called programmatic buying, which is a method of selling and buying online display ‎advertising in real time. This way, the inventory for presenting an ad to a user (also called an impression) is not sold directly from a publisher (such as CNN News) to an advertiser (such as Coca-Cola). Instead, it is channeled and masked through various platforms and often changes several hands along the way, as seen in Figure 23-1. Aggressive practices or even malicious code ...