Mobile ad technology company AppLift has found that more than a third of mobile traffic is at risk of fraud. Of 34 per cent at risk, 22 per cent is suspect and 12 per cent presents a high risk.

A press release says traffic from campaigns run on a cost per click (CPC) basis is three times less likely to be fraudulent than for cost per million (CPM) campaigns. Traffic from campaigns run on a cost per impression (CPI) basis is 10 times less likely to be fraudulent than for CPM campaigns.

Fraud is highest at night. The relative amount of fraud goes up then as many fraud tactics are not sophisticated enough to take into account actual levels of app usage.

At any stage of the conversion funnel, it is possible to simulate actions (impressions, clicks, installs and such) by employing low-wage workers. Bots mimic human behaviour in order to fake actions, leading to fraudulent impression views, clicks, installs, and event post-install events.

With eMarketer predicting that US mobile programmatic media buying will reach $20.45 billion by 2017, fraud detection is a major multi-billion concern for advertisers. The study is powered by DataLift, a proprietary programmatic platform of AppLift, developed in India, and fraud detection tool Forensiq. AppLift conducted comprehensive tests over all available programmatic inventory to assess the scope and magnitude of programmatic ad fraud. Over four weeks, it monitored more than 60 million impressions from our programmatic RTB platform, DataLift, to gather insights into suspected fraudulent traffic, the press release adds. All the data points are in impression units.

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