Last year, the games category was hardest hit, experiencing 35 percent fraud rates. The next category that fraudsters attacked was e-commerce, which experienced 20 percent fraud rates. In 2018, however, there has been a dramatic shift. E-commerce is now the most affected vertical, accounting for two-fifths of the total installs rejected by Adjust. The other top mobile app categories most affected after e-commerce are games (with 30 percent), followed by travel apps (with 10 percent).
The new scam du jour is SDK spoofing or faking an install of an app on a real device. Adjust said this form of fraud is the most difficult to detect of all fraud schemes, and it has rapidly gained momentum and become fraudsters’ preferred scam du jour.
Adjust’s initial investigation found that SDK Spoofing is globally distributed across all markets and is attributable to 37 percent of all rejected installs.
The app categories hit hardest by SDK Spoofing are:
● Games 29 percent
● E-commerce 27 percent
● Food and drink 17 percent
Single campaigns experienced up to 80 percent of all installs attributable to SDK Spoofing. This means that some advertisers could be losing 80 percent of their ad budgets. For some individual advertisers, the loss could easily be in the tens of millions.
Adjust’s Fraud Prevention Suite rejected twice as many app installs on Android versus iOS devices, based on Click Injection, where clicks are triggered before an app is fully installed. This fraud type only occurs on Android devices, yet is attributable to 33 percent of all rejected installs.
App categories hardest hit by Click Injection are:
● E-commerce 51 percent
● Games 23 percent
● Travel 8 percent
“When Adjust spearheaded our industry-wide initiative last year, the Coalition Against Ad Fraud (CAAF), it was the first step to bring together key players in the mobile ecosystem to collectively fight fraud,” said Christian Henschel, CEO of Adjust, in a statement. “Yet the ongoing status quo of ignoring widespread mobile ad fraud by some remains the weakest link and biggest challenge for our industry in 2018. Aligned on one goal, Adjust’s next step is to help educate the market about all the different fraud types used, so all players can undertake a stronger defense and implement effective countermeasures to fight fraud head-on.”