The most anticipated time of the year for brands is here. Holiday season starting with Black Friday and ending with Christmas and New Year, is a 2-month-long splurging season. And while shoppers go all gaga, brands also increase their digital ad spends to be seen by their ideal audience, stand out in the crowd and make the most of the holiday traffic.
But behind the sparkle lies the real threat, waiting for the perfect moment to strike. Amidst all the glitter, the brands need to keep their guard high. With rising ad spends, fraudsters keep a hawk’s eye on your every move, ready to exploit any opportunity rising from your holiday traffic.
During the holiday season, brands face a variety of ad fraud threats, including click fraud, impression fraud, fake installs, SDK spoofing, domain spoofing, brand bidding, etc. Each of these can drain budgets, distort performance metrics, and harm brand reputation.
In this blog, you will discover:
- Why holiday season attracts ad fraud?
- Top web and app fraud risks to watch during peak season?
- How to look for the early ad fraud warning signals?
- How to prevent ad fraud from draining your ROI?
Why does the Holiday Season Attract Fraudsters?
Right before the holiday season, marketers ramp up their digital ad spends to maximize their holiday traffic and protect financial goals. Yet, these same efforts can unintentionally open the scope for fraudsters to bring their fraud tactics into action. Let’s understand how-
1. Higher Budget Allocation on Ads
Marketers incur huge expenses on advertisements as the final act of promotion before the year ends. This catches the attention of fraudsters who instigate fake clicks in the digital advertisement and drain ad budgets, draining ROI.
2. Inflated Click Through Rate
Fraudsters use deceptive tactics by employing bots, click farms, and automated scripts to generate invalid clicks without any genuine intent. These boosts click through rate artificially, creating deceptive numbers and presenting distorted performance metrics.
3. Complex Journeys
Multiple apps, platforms, and devices create more touchpoints for fraud infiltration. As users interact across smartphones, web apps, and various digital services, each step in the journey becomes a potential entry point for fraudsters. From fake app installs and these multiple touchpoints make it harder to monitor and secure the user experience, leading to misallocated marketing spends.
Holiday Season Fraud Possibilities in the Web and App Ecosystem
With fraudsters constantly getting smarter, brands must stay one step ahead. Here’s a look at the top ad fraud threats that surface during the holiday season across web and app ecosystems:
Possible Fraud Threats in the Web Campaigns
1. Click Fraud
Click fraud thrives in festive season like Black Friday, emerging as one of the most insidious types of fraud that generates fake and invalid clicks on PPC ads running on websites and search engines.
Know how a click fraud detection helps to prevent click fraud
2. Domain Spoofing
Fraudsters misrepresent their websites to appear as premium or legitimate domains, tricking ad networks and users. This includes premium domain spoofing to inflate ad value and brand bidding to hijack keywords of your brand, draining budgets and harming campaign performance.
3. Bot Traffic & Automated Scripts
Fraudsters use bots or automated scripts to generate fake clicks, impressions, form submissions, or account sign-ups, causing sudden traffic spikes, giving advertisers a false sense of engagement while draining budgets. There are sophisticated bots as well, which can be programmed to mimic human behaviour, varying IP addresses, devices, and browsing patterns, making detection even harder.
Web Fraud Red Flags
The alarm for web fraud rings through the following signals –
- Sudden Traffic Spikes – Sudden surges often indicate bot activity.
- High Impressions – Consistent spikes in CPM campaigns may signal repetitive bot impressions.
- Low Click-to-Conversion Rate – High clicks but few conversion points to bot visits.
- Traffic from Unexpected Locations – Visits from outside your target area suggest bot interference.
- Suspicious IP Addresses – Heavy traffic from a single IP is a strong indicator of bots; blocking helps prevent attacks.
Possible Fraud Threats in App
1. Click Injection & Click Spamming
Fraudsters manipulate ad clicks by generating fake interactions, often just before an app install or conversion. This tricks attribution systems into crediting them for actions they didn’t drive, inflating costs for brands and advertisers.
Read in detail the difference between click injection and click spamming
2. Fake Installs & SDK Spoofing
Some attackers simulate app installs or tamper with SDK data to make it appear as if real users are downloading and engaging with an app.
3. In-App Purchase Fraud
Unauthorized or manipulated purchases occur when attackers exploit app payment flows. They may steal money, redeem virtual goods, or trigger refunds.
4. Malware & Malicious Apps
Malicious applications can secretly collect sensitive user data, redirect traffic, or even hijack other apps.
5. Signups & Purchases
A referral campaign can quickly attract new signups and purchases, but ROIs are still low as fraudsters exploit the system through fake referrals, coupon misuse, reseller fraud, draining ad budgets and harming brand reputation.
App Fraud Red Flags
Early app fraud signals include –
- High Clicks/Installs – Abnormally high engagement may indicate bots or fake activity.
- Low Retention/High Uninstalls – Quick app abandonment signals fraudulent installs.
- Attribution Gaps – Mismatched traffic or sudden spikes suggest click injection or spoofing.
- Low Engagement from Paid Sources – High spend with minimal activity indicates fake traffic.
- MMP data vs CRM Mismatch – Reported installs without real user actions point to non-existent users.
Fraud Prevention Measures: Towards a Fraud-Free Holiday Season
To ensure that you make the most out of this high-spend period, with a strong campaign strategy, stronger defences are also required. Therefore, a robust is required. Valid8 by mFilterIt provides robust protection from ever-evolving ad fraud threats, ensuring that the brands have transparency of where their spends are going and who is interacting with their ads.
How Valid8 by mFilterIt solves ad fraud?
- Full-Funnel Protection – Monitors and secures every stage of the customer journey, from click to conversion.
- Fraud Detection Engine – Identifies and blocks advanced fraud techniques including human like bot patterns, spoofing, and click injection.
- AI + ML checks – Combines machine learning algorithms with expert analysis for faster threat resolution.
- Source-level Intelligence – Gives transparency of the sources interacting with ads
- Platform Integrations – Seamlessly integrates with all major ad networks, MMPs, and analytics tools.
- Omnichannel Coverage – Safeguards campaigns across web, app, programmatic, and affiliate channels — giving your brand one consistent layer of trust.
Conclusion
The holiday season is one of the crucial periods for the brands and prone to threats. Advertisers are under the pressure to deliver, and the stakes are high. This becomes an ideal opportunity for the fraudsters to find loopholes, mix the traffic and gain benefits out of the ad spends.
Therefore, advertisers need to be more cautious and invest on not just bringing new traffic but also to protect their ad budgets and the campaign performance. With a third-party ad fraud detection tool in the tech-stack, brands not just ensure they are getting genuine traffic but also optimize with clean traffic, therefore improving the ROAS.
This holiday season don’t let ad fraud impact your campaign performance. Get a traffic audit done. Connect with our experts.
