Ad Fraud

The practice of fraudulently creating or simulating online advertisement impressions, clicks, conversions or other data events in order to generate revenue; ad fraud is the categorical term covering every form of online advertising fraud, including the narrower click fraud, and is associated with banner ads, video ads and in-app ads as well as search marketing, mobile advertising and affiliate marketing conversion fraud. It is classified as a form of cybercrime, and a successful campaign typically combines identity fraud with attribution fraud, for example routing fake traffic through bots using falsified social accounts and cookies that click on ads placed on a scam page impersonating a well known brand. Awareness of the problem dates back to at least 1999 in academic research, and in 2004 Google's chief financial officer George Reyes called click fraud the biggest threat to the internet economy; by 2016, HP Enterprise's Business of Hacking report identified ad fraud as the easiest and most lucrative form of cybercrime, the same year the World Federation of Advertisers issued its first formal guidance after estimating the practice was consuming close to twenty billion dollars of its members' ad budgets. In 2017, Procter and Gamble and Chase both sharply cut their digital ad spending and the number of sites they advertised on in an effort to reduce their exposure to fraud, and AppsFlyer estimated financial exposure to app install fraud alone reached eight hundred million dollars in the first quarter of 2018. A 2023 study found that an average of about eleven and a half percent of search engine advertisements involved fraudulent activity.