What is ad fraud?
Ad fraud is the deliberate faking of advertising activity, such as impressions, clicks, installs, leads or video views, so that someone gets paid for ads no real person saw or acted on. It is carried out with bots, malware, spoofed websites and apps, hidden ads and manipulated attribution, and it drains budgets while corrupting campaign data.
Ad fraud is the intentional subset of invalid traffic. Common schemes include bot traffic on cheap websites, domain spoofing (pretending low-quality inventory is a premium news site), ad stacking and pixel stuffing (ads that load but cannot be seen), SSAI spoofing in connected TV, and mobile tricks such as click injection and SDK spoofing that steal credit for app installs.
Fraud thrives where money moves fast and verification is weak: long reseller chains, opaque traffic arbitrage, and new channels where measurement lags. The industry's defenses are standards such as ads.txt and sellers.json, certification programmes like TAG Certified Against Fraud, and independent fraud detection before and after the bid.