What is Retargeting Fraud and how to protect your ad budget

Retargeting fraud is one of the most common types of ad and click fraud. This article describes the process of retargeting fraud and gives tips on how to protect your advertising budget. What is retargeting? Retargeting is a digital marketing technique used to show ads to people who have previously interacted with a website or […]

VASTFLUX – Ad fraud scheme with 12 billion bid requests a day

At the end of 2022, a new advertising fraud scheme was uncovered and stopped: VASTFLUX. The fraudsters managed to inject malicious code into ad slots, allowing them to inject multiple invisible video ads on top of each other hidden from the user. This way, VASTFLUX was able to make more than 12 billion bid requests […]

How advertisers and agencies use fraud0

The market for digital advertising fraud is booming. Current estimates predict a 23% increase in digital ad fraud losses by 2023 – to $100 billion a year! At fraud0, we want our software to help companies protect their advertising budgets from fraudsters and bots, and deliver their ad inventory to real people in the best possible way. […]

What is click fraud? How to protect yourself from advertising fraud

Click fraud refers to the generation of clicks on advertisements on the Internet with fraudulent or malicious intent. The aim of the fraudsters is to generate additional advertising revenue for themselves or to put such a drain on competitors’ advertising budgets that their ads are significantly reduced in volume or no longer present at all. […]

What is Invalid Traffic? How to protect yourself from GIVT & SIVT

What is Invalid Traffic (IVT)? According to Google’s definition, Invalid Traffic (IVT) is a generic term for all forms of ad impressions or click activity that is not based on the activity of human users with genuine (purchase) interest, but is generated automatically, e.g. by bots. In addition to accidental ad clicks, the term primarily includes […]

Facebook: $277 million GDPR fine over scraping bots

On November 28, the Irish data protection authority, the Data Protection Commission (DPC), fined Facebook parent company Meta $277 million for two violations of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Attackers were able to obtain the data of more than 533 million users over an extended period of time by exploiting a security weakness. This is the […]

What is a Click Farm and how to protect your ad budget from it?

What is a click farm? A click farm is a professionally organized group of workers (called “click workers”) whose job is to click on ads on the Internet, share social media posts, or post comments. They operate mostly from developing countries and in a legal gray area, although they are clearly involved in advertising and […]

Fake Future #2: AI-generated synthetic images

In our “Fake Future” series of articles, we want to look at new technologies that have the potential to fundamentally define the future. In our last article, we focused on deepfake videos. How they are created, what use cases there are and what the current legal situation is. This article highlights the use of artificial intelligence […]

Performance Max: Pros and cons of the new Google Ads campaigns

Automation is finding its way into more and more areas of digital marketing and also the advertising industry. Google’s answer to this trend is the new Performance Max campaigns. Machine learning promises advertisers not only easier creation of advertising materials, but also greater reach with better performance and lower costs at the same time. In […]

Fake Future #1: Deepfake videos

We like to be on the cutting edge. Whether it is new methods of advertising fraud, bot traffic, or new technologies that have the potential to change the world. One of these technologies are deepfakes. Mostly short videos that are displayed in the social media feed or forwarded by someone else – Yes mom, I […]