Online advertising fraud has been a problem for the industry since the dawn of the internet. The practice has grown more sophisticated in recent years along with the amount spent on such ads. Fetch has acknowledged the challenge publicly and said it was working with research firm Forensiq to “fight against mobile ad fraud.”
“One of the biggest challenges we face as digital marketers is to reduce mobile ad fraud,” Fetch’s Connelly said a year ago.
Around the same time, Fetch’s global head of media, Steve Hobbs, told Adweek that a “significant amount” of downloads in Fetch’s system are flagged as suspicious. “Where there’s money, there is fraud,” he told the publication. “Being 100 percent on top of it is an impossibility, but we think with Forensiq’s help we can get it significantly lower.”
Uber learned of the alleged fraud when it was trying to avoid scandal of a different kind. The company had asked Fetch not to post advertisements on Breitbart News, a site run by President Trump’s former chief strategist, Steve Bannon. But it saw ads appearing there anyway.
Fetch pulled ads from all networks that had a relationship with Breitbart, but the move had little effect on the number of people downloading the app, contrary to Fetch’s claims, the complaint said. Uber pays Fetch and other ad networks a fee when a potential customer downloads its app after seeing an ad. Uber alleged that after further inspection, Fetch had a widespread practice of over-billing. Uber claims that Fetch had been attempting to claim credit for app downloads it didn’t generate.
“With Fetch, we learned the age-old lesson ‘buyer beware’ the hard way,” the company said in an emailed statement. “Fetch was running a wild west of online advertising fraud.” From 2015 to early 2017, Uber paid more than $82.5 million for advertisements overseen by Fetch, according to the complaint. Uber has refused to pay more than $7 million that Fetch has said it owes. Fetch’s publicly traded parent company Dentsu, which has a 1.36 billion yen ($12 billion) market capitalization, is not named in the lawsuit. Fetch’s Connelly said there is “no basis to these claims” by Uber relating to ad-fraud as a reason not to pay it’s invoices. “Fetch takes ad fraud extremely seriously and has been working with clients and suppliers to minimize its impact within ad networks,” he said.