Mobile Ad Fraud

If you are an app marketer, you might relate to this situation.   “You launched an app campaign, on the surface, the metrics look promising, installs are going high, and the campaign performance looks good. But something is still not adding up. Retention rates are lower than expected. Installs are spiking at odd hours from unfamiliar geographies. Your post-install events don’t reflect real user behavior. Even after constant re-engagement efforts, ROI still falls short, and your reporting starts to lose credibility within the team.  Despite investing heavily in your app campaigns to acquire new users and retain the existing ones, you are not getting the desired results. All this is a sign of a threat – mobile ad fraud.  Mobile ad fraud has evolved far beyond the install stage. Fraudsters now exploit loopholes at every stage of the app marketing funnel.  According to a first party analysis by mFilterIt of 196 campaigns run in 2024, a significant rise was seen in ad fraud in apps at each level of the funnel, highest being at the install stage at 43%, impressions at 20%, clicks at 17%, and events at 35%. Moreover, app marketers relying on MMPs for fraud detection often fall short in identifying sophisticated and evolving forms of mobile ad fraud across the funnel. Why Detection Methods by MMPs Don’t Work with Sophisticated Mobile Ad Fraud Techniques? While sophisticated mobile app fraud tactics continue to siphon billions from global ad budgets, what’s even more alarming is the widespread reliance on traditional ad fraud protection tools and MMPs that only guard at the install stage.  Mobile Measurement Partners (MMPs) only track where installs come from and help attribute performance. They are not app fraud prevention platforms.  In fact, many MMPs:  Rely on probabilistic or last-click attribution models that can be easily manipulated  Do not block fraud proactively  Have limited visibility into pre-install (e.g., impression fraud, click injection) and post-install fraud (e.g., fake purchases, re-engagement fraud)  Similarly, conventional mobile app fraud solutions often focus only on specific metrics like install anomalies but fail to provide the comprehensive coverage required to monitor the entire app user journey.  This fragmented approach may catch some fraud, but it doesn’t fix the root issue. What marketers need today is a unified app fraud detection solution that monitors, detects, and prevents fraud at every funnel touchpoint, ensuring that every dollar spent on mobile advertising is going toward actual user growth.  How the Full-Funnel Approach Brings Transparency for App Marketers? Brands need to combat mobile ad fraud across the mobile marketing funnel, not just at the install validation stage. A full funnel mobile ad fraud protection strategy ensures proactive detection and filtration from ad impressions to re-engagement, ensuring clean traffic, optimized performance, and growth.  1. Pre-Install Stage: Ad Clicks & Impressions The first encounter users have with your app is through ad impressions and clicks. However, this stage is often manipulated by fraudsters using click spamming, click injection, and impression fraud. Malicious actors generate illegitimate clicks or fake ad views, often in the background or through hidden placements, to falsely claim attribution.  A funnel protection strategy helps by separating genuine engagement from noise. An app fraud detection tool works proactively to stop suspicious activity before it impacts your campaign.  2. Install Stage: Verifying Real User Acquisition At the point of install, mobile ad fraud tactics become more technically sophisticated. Fraudsters use SDK spoofing, device farms, and emulators to simulate real installs and collect payouts without delivering any real users.  This distorts your cost-per-install metrics and pollutes your user base with non-human traffic. Using AI & ML-based deeper-level filters ensures that only legitimate installs from real devices make it through.  3. Post-Install Events: Ensuring Engagement Authenticity Once a user installs your app, the focus shifts to engagement, whether that’s completing registration, making a purchase, or triggering any other event. However, fake registrations, event spoofing, and simulated purchases are common tactics fraudsters use to inflate post-install metrics and claim undeserved payouts.  An app fraud protection solution closely monitors user behavior post-install to ensure only authentic engagement is counted.  Know How Your Brand is Under Threat Due to Incent Campaigns 4. Re-Engagement Campaigns: Driving Retention & Lifetime Value Re-engagement campaigns are critical for driving retention and lifetime value. However, this stage is frequently exploited through organic poaching, where fraudsters claim credit for users who were already planning to return, and Sophisticated Invalid Traffic (SIVT), which uses advanced bots to simulate user reactivation.  Without proper validation, your retargeting budget could be wasted on traffic that offers no incremental value. An ad fraud detection solution validates each click or event based on various parameters to ensure genuine user activity.  Bust the Myths Behind Re-Engagement Campaigns Ensuring End-to-End App Campaign Protection Across Funnel with mFilterIt When it comes to combating mobile ad fraud, focusing solely on the install stage will not work. It is imperative to adopt full-funnel protection, focusing on detecting ad fraud and preventing it within the entire customer journey from the first impression to post-install and re-engagement interactions.   At mFilterIt, our ad fraud detection solution – Valid8- uses advanced behavioral analytics and proactive detection parameters, ensuring your entire app campaign is clean, credible, and cost-effective.  How Valid8 Detects Fraud at the Pre-Install Stage: Analyzes click-to-install time to detect click injection patterns.  Identifies high-frequency, low-quality traffic bursts that indicate click spamming.  Filters out non-viewable or bot-generated impressions to maintain media quality.  Flags suspicious referrers or device behaviors using anomaly detection models.  The result is a cleaner top-of-funnel that safeguards your CPI investments and provides better insights for accurate attribution.  How Valid8 Detects Fraud at the Install Stage: Uses device fingerprinting to identify installs from emulators or rooted devices.  Uses OS-level hardware signals to detect spoofed environments.  Cross-validates installs based on behavioral patterns to confirm authenticity.  Flags are installed from known fraudulent IPs or anomalous geolocations.  By validating every install, mFilterIt ensures that you’re paying for actual user acquisition, not empty metrics.  How Valid8 Detects Fraud at the Post-Install Stage: Tracks interaction sequences and timing to differentiate between

Mobile apps are big business and the same is apparent through the significant advertising budgets dedicated to increasing app installs. In 2022 alone, advertisers spent more than $18 billion on advertising their apps to drive more installs. This makes the app install advertising business lucrative.   Unfortunately, this lure also attracts bad actors and frauds. That’s perhaps why, today, app install fraud is one of the most common forms of ad fraud in the online realm. According to our analysis, we have found that on IOS, the average fraud at the install level is 57% which rapidly increases to 70% on Android devices.   Fraudsters use fake app installs to steal from advertising budgets. The financial impact of this, while significant, is only a small part of all the trouble caused for the advertisers as a result of these activities. What’s more troublesome is that fraudsters are evolving their methods and employing sophisticated methods to carry out their fraudulent activities.    In times like these, advertisers need to start ahead of the curve to protect their ad budgets. To do this, one must first understand how app install fraud works and that’s exactly what the next section describes. Read on.  The Hidden Tactics Behind Install Fraud While it may seem like app install fraud is a single threat, the reality is much more complex. Fraudsters utilize several simple and complex methods to fake installs and steal from advertisers’ budgets. Here’s a quick overview of the most common methods employed by app install fraudsters:  – Click Injection: This is one of the most sophisticated forms of app install fraud. To execute this, fraudsters publish an app that “listens” for app download broadcasts. Using this information, they can “inject” a click right before an app install is completed. This allows fraudsters to claim the credit for the app install despite not contributing anything to make it happen.  – Click Spamming: Click spamming is usually employed to target campaigns where advertisers are paying for clicks on their ads. As the name suggests, fraudsters generate a large number of fake clicks, usually using bots, and claim the rewards. However, the advertiser unfortunately ends up paying for clicks that will not result in any genuine interest or installs of their application.  – Organic Hijacking: Another sophisticated form of app install fraud; organic hijacking works by stealing the credit of organic installs. Fraudsters employ malware or other methods to send a fake click right before an app download is completed, claiming the credit for the app installs, along with the associated reward.   – Incent traffic: This type of app install fraud is one of the most difficult to detect, as it uses real users to scam advertisers. In this type of fraud, fraudsters place ads on incent walls and incentivize real users to download an application and in some cases, complete an action that claims the reward. In many cases, fraudsters straight out share a part of their affiliate payout with the user. While there are real users involved and the app download is also authentic, since the user is only interested in the reward, the entire activity doesn’t drive any value for the advertiser.   – SDK Spoofing: With SDK Spoofing, fraudsters usually use a malware-laced app of their own to infect user devices. This app then manipulates the SDK communication of the advertisers’ apps to generate fake installs and register other actions that may be rewarded by the advertiser. Alarmingly, such an activity is extremely difficult to track and can be conducted indefinitely, effectively draining entire ad budgets without delivering any real value.   But Aren’t Fraud Checks by MMPs Enough?   Impression campaigns are often the first leg of a successful, larger ad campaign that may target app installs. As a first step, getting authentic impressions is important to make informed decisions to drive more app installs. To make sure their impression campaign data is authentic, many advertisers depend on Mobile Measurement Platforms or MMPs.  Unfortunately, MMPs are not as capable or dependable as many advertisers have been led to believe. One of the biggest problems with MMPs is that they are paid for impression attribution and not validation. To that end, if they start reporting all the fraudulent impressions, it may affect their revenue associated with attribution.   Moreover, in cases where MMPs can detect and report impression fraud, the standard timeline is simply too slow to make any real impact. Most MMPs follow a D+7 reporting schedule, creating a significant delay between the moment a fraudulent activity is detected and the time when an advertiser finds out about it. Finally, most MMPs employ basic checks to detect fraud which are largely ineffective against sophisticated ad fraud techniques.  The Cost of Fake Installs: Why It’s More Than Just Wasted Budget  No doubt, the wasted ad budget is perhaps the most obviously painful effect of ad fraud experienced by advertisers. However, impact of ad fraud goes much deeper than draining your budget and can have a long-term impact on the business.   Fraudulent activities, when undetected, can also skew the ad performance data that advertisers depend on to make optimization decisions. These distorted key performance indicators (KPIs) can further lead to advertisers making optimization decisions that waste even more of their marketing budget.  Not to forget, skewed metrics also impact other decisions related to user acquisition and experience. The wrong decisions, especially in the case of user experience, can lead businesses to decisions that worsen the experience of installing and using their apps, negatively impacting long-term user retention and organic App Store/Play Store rankings.   In other words, a wasted ad budget is just the tip of the iceberg. App install fraud can impact user data analytics which can, in turn, impact long-term marketing ROI. Red Flags Valid8 has Detected  Fighting fraud starts with detecting fraud. Advertisers must stay vigilant and look for the following signs to catch instances of fraud and deal with the fraudsters before they can cause significant harm:  Abnormally Low Conversion Rate– An