India has high incidence of mobile ad frauds

Chennai: Mobile ad frauds are becoming a major challenge for marketers. Among Asian countries, India leads in mobile ad frauds.

Marketers find mobile ad fraud as their biggest threat. Indian marketers spend nearly 20 per cent of their advertising budget on ad fraud, a survey by Mobile Marketing Association found.

Major types of ad frauds are cookie stuffing, adware traffic, data fraud and ad injection.

There are mainly three classes of fraud and India is at high-risk of all the three. These include, traffic frauds that seek to boost impressions, clicks or other website activity counts.

Misrepresentation frauds attempt to falsify site or ad-specific info and these include ad stacking or device hijacking, falsified device/ location/cookie-level info, domain spoofing, ad injection and cookie fraud.

Attribution fraud occurs when one party takes credit for conversions that it didn’t influence. This includes: cookie stuffing, human-generated inflation, device hijacking etc.

Almost 95 per cent of the Indian respondents felt that lack of penalties and transparency in industry regulations were giving rise to ad fraud. Lack of data sharing and large number of middlemen are also a cause to ad fraud risks.

“In India, the awareness on ad fraud risks is very low with almost a fifth of the marketers being unclear of their ad fraud budget and majority of them believing that fraudulent activities will only increase. Brand safety on mobile is the biggest concern today and this benchmark report clearly demonstrates that this needs immediate addressal. Marketers will need to be extra cautious to attacks such as ad injections, data fraud, cookie stuffing, etc. Marketers must understand the potential of technologies such as Blockchain that can help solve issues related to fraud and create security and transparency in mobile marketing ecosystem,” said Moneka Khurana, Country Head, MMA India.

Marketers view blockchain as a potential technology in fighting against fraud and transparency issues. However, only 37 per cent respondents in India are aware of blockchain and its application to fraud prevention.