Mobile Frauds

Ever since smartphones became easier to reach every hand, there’s a lot going in app world. You can see every sort of apps in the market today, from the one that can keep track of your fitness to just about ANYTHING! So if I tell you that App-market is one of the fastest growing area, it wouldn’t be a surprise. But do you know, this is also the market that is prone to more fraud?

App-marketeers, they are trying to grow their app base either via organic ways or by spending a lot of money on the digital marketing channels, whereas Fake app installs are part of developers and advertisers’ daily life. These are not the incentive installs or install by bots. But publishers have actually invented various different fraud techniques which are really hard to figure out.

Mobile advertising click fraud in India is 2.4X higher than global averages, and mobile app install fraud is 1.7X higher. While global mobile ad fraud averages just over 15%, ad fraud in the Indian subcontinent is much higher: 31.9%.

Source: Forbes

So, let me take you through the reality of App fraud and how smartly publishers are doing it.

Frauding is an evil art that relies on many different tools and methods. It depends on a wide range of instruments and techniques. You will presumably know the most well-known ones, however I wager you will be astonished by the newest.

Some of the common fraud techniques which publishers today use are:

• Device Farms: Fraudsters create fake engagement through large number of devices to give impression of legitimate activity.
• Click Spam: Fake clicks get generated in the background to capture organic app installs. Here, fraudulent publishers charge the advertisers for the users that did not get sourced through them.
• Fake Devices: Fraudulent publishers use technology to make BOTS that mirror human behaviour, making it difficult to distinguish real users from fake users.
• Hyper-Engagement: They do a lot of engagement to deliver you KPI’s and Influxes of clicks at regular intervals.
• Fake Attribution: Attribution for an app download/install (organic and inorganic) is captured through a fraudulent app, thus claiming undue credit for the download.

Now here’s a quick question: How would you look for these frauds?

There are two ways you can identify if someone is giving you a fraud attribution.

1. Fraud detecting tools.

2. Data.

There are many fraud detection tools like Scalarr that you can use to identify the pre-install fraud which are being done by the publishers and the post-install fraud like hyper-engagement after installation of the app. Though the post-install fraud can be detected by Data too by using the post-install engagement insights.

Mobile publishers are continuously getting smarter in creating fraud techniques but the post-install engagement is always hard to fake.

So to cut to the chase, let me tell you some of the quick insights which are easy indicators of the fraud:

1. The engagement data of the publisher is as good as or better than “Organic”.

2. There is always some problem in consistency of the data i.e you will see a non-uniform graph whenever you plot it.

To make it more clear, let’s dive deeper into it and try to visualise by creating some scenarios. Before that, remember you can get fraud install from Affiliates network.

Now, try to picture a case where other networks are giving better KPI’s than organic ones. From what I’ve experienced, Organic is the channel which performs the best, since user him/herself search/look for the app and come to use it. So to conclude, any network cannot possibly perform better than organic. (This is based on my observations and hand-on experience on data, but it *is* susceptible to be wrong.)

If you look at the below stats, the picture becomes clearer. You can see how XYZ network is delivering installs with much better quality than other channels. Fishy, right?

There can be more such examples or post install behaviour pattern that are really helpful to identify fraudulent activities.

So before we reach to the end and I lose your attention, below are a few final takeaways from this post.

According to appsflyer:

1. Set clear fraud terms with all of your media sources. This will help avoid lengthy reconciliation negotiations down the line.

2. Pay attention to your in-app engagement patterns and raw data reports using the methods outlined in this post. If you see something suspicious, bring it up with your attribution provider and media source partners.

3. Stick with secure SDK providers. One-off solutions like signatures are easily compromised and require that you keep your SDK integration updated each time you are breached.

4. Keep your measurement SDKs up-to-date to ensure that you have the latest security measures applied.

5. When selecting a fraud provider, look for someone with deep knowledge of the mobile industry, a broad mobile data set and the ability to block fraud in real-time.

Thank you for reading it till the end. Feels good to write after so long!