Ad fraud has become one of the most pressing challenges in digital advertising. Operating silently and persistently, it drains billions from marketing budgets – often without clear signs or immediate detection.
Ad fraud has a highly sophisticated ecosystem, involving bots that simulate human traffic, spoofed domains that mimic premium inventory, and fake impressions that never reach real users.
Driven by automation, speed, and scale – fraud finds fertile ground. While advertisers focus on optimizing performance metrics, fraudulent activity can quietly undermine campaign effectiveness and ROI.
The real question is: what’s happening behind the scenes of your campaigns – and more importantly, how can you protect your budget from being wasted?
What Is Ad Fraud?
Let's explore it step by step. Ad fraud is the intentional manipulation of digital advertising activity to generate revenue through deceptive means. It involves exploiting the mechanics of ad delivery and measurement to siphon off ad spend without providing any real value – often without the advertiser ever knowing. This is not a small-scale issue. It’s a sophisticated, global operation that spans fake websites, bots, mobile apps, and even connected TVs.
There are several key types of ad fraud:
Impression fraud. This occurs when an ad is “served” but never actually viewed by a real user. Fraudsters may load ads in invisible iframes, off-screen placements, or even stack multiple ads on top of one another. From the advertiser’s perspective, it looks like a valid impression – but it’s pure waste.
Click fraud. In this scheme, fraudsters use bots or low-paid human workers (click farms) to repeatedly click on ads. These fake clicks inflate performance metrics and drain budgets – especially in cost-per-clics campaigns – without any intent to engage or convert.
Install fraud. Common in mobile advertising, install fraud involves fake or incentivized app installs to trigger payout in cost-per-install campaigns. Fraudsters may use device emulators or hijack real installs to make it appear as though they were driven by an ad.
Domain spoofing. In domain spoofing, fraudsters disguise low-quality or fraudulent websites to appear as premium publishers in the ad auction. This tricks advertisers into paying top dollar for what they believe is high-value inventory – only to end up on sites with no real audience or brand safety.
CTV fraud. One of the fastest-growing forms of ad fraud, CTV fraud involves spoofed CTV devices, fake streaming sessions, or invalid traffic being passed off as legitimate premium inventory. Because CTV environments are harder to track and verify (e.g., no cookies, limited third-party measurement), they’ve become a lucrative target for fraud operations.
The most widespread form of ad fraud today is impression fraud, particularly through bot-generated invalid traffic. This type of fraud is popular because it’s easy to scale and difficult to detect. By using automated scripts or large botnets, fraudsters can simulate ad views that appear legitimate to standard analytics tools. Since many advertisers purchase inventory on a CPM basis, fraudsters can profit simply by generating fake impressions – regardless of whether a real person ever sees the ad.
Industry reports support this trend. According to HUMAN, a significant share of global ad fraud losses stems from fake impressions and bot activity. In open programmatic marketplaces, studies by DoubleVerify have found that up to 20–25% of impressions may be fraudulent without proper verification tools in place. While emerging threats like CTV fraud are gaining traction, impression fraud remains the most common and damaging tactic in the digital ad ecosystem.
Why You Should Care: The Business Impact
Every dollar spent on fraudulent impressions, clicks, or installs is a dollar that doesn’t reach a real audience, generate engagement, or drive ROI.
One of the most damaging effects of ad fraud is wasted media spend. When bots or fake domains intercept your ads, you’re paying for exposure that delivers zero value. According to the ANA (Association of National Advertisers), marketers lose an estimated $1 for every $3 spent on digital ads in fraud-prone environments.
Beyond wasted budget, fraud also skews your performance data – making it harder to optimize campaigns, benchmark accurately, or make informed decisions. If a campaign shows strong click-through rates or impressions but no meaningful conversions, fraud could be distorting your metrics.
There's also a reputation and brand safety risk. Fraudulent inventory may place your ads next to inappropriate, irrelevant, or even harmful content. This not only diminishes brand equity but can erode consumer trust.
And with fraud growing fastest in premium channels like CTV and mobile apps, the impact is no longer limited to cheap banner ads. High-CPM environments are now prime targets – meaning even your most valuable ad placements may not be as secure as you think.
In short, ad fraud drains budgets, misleads strategy, and compromises brand integrity. Addressing it isn’t just a matter of efficiency –it’s essential to protecting your advertising investment
What You Can Do: Defense Tactics
The first step is to choose your partners wisely. Work only with platforms and SSPs that use MRC-accredited fraud detection tools. These solutions are designed to detect and filter out invalid traffic before your ad spend is wasted. At Intenze, we take this a step further - partnering exclusively with verified supply sources, and integrating advanced fraud-prevention tools directly into our buying infrastructure to ensure every impression is as clean and effective as possible.
Transparency is equally important. Ensure your partners provide clear, real-time reporting so you can monitor performance and flag anomalies quickly. Participation in industry standards like ads.txt, app-ads.txt, and sellers.json is also critical - these tools help authenticate supply sources and reduce the risk of domain spoofing and unauthorized reselling.
On the tech side, implement both pre-bid and post-bid verification to catch fraud at every stage of the buying process. Pre-bid tools help you avoid bidding on suspicious inventory, while post-bid analysis ensures your impressions are reaching the right audiences.
Staying proactive and vigilant is key. With the right tools, transparent practices, and trusted partners like Intenze, advertisers can take back control and protect their media investments from fraud.