Ad Fraud

Ad Fraud describes a scheme in which an abuser creates a fake site (or often many fake sites), places ads on those sites through an ad network, and then uses bots (or other mechanisms like zero-width embeds) to generate disingenuous traffic to their site. Because ad-networks pay publishers based on the volume of ad traffic and clicks that they originate, this scheme ends up funneling ad revenues from advertisers into the hands of the fraudster, with the ad-network making some cash along the way too.

Ad fraud is a challenging problem to deal with because it relies on distinguishing either the legitimacy of publications or the legitimacy of traffic, and neither problem is easy to solve.

Moreover, Ad-Fraud is a challenging problem to tackle because the party most able to tackle the problem (the ad-network) has a short term financial incentive to support and boost this type of activity, since they generate profit off of it, and it makes their traffic volume look bigger than it is.

Over time however, online ad-dollars have started to move toward Facebook and Google ads, in large part because these two platforms have collected the requisite personal data about most people interacting online to be able to crack down on Ad-Fraud more effectively than ad-networks that don't have access to this kind of cross-platform cross-site data.