One of the greatest things about FraudScore is that we are able to share our clients’ unique experiences and cases. Simply, our clients face ad fraud every day, and their stories indicate just how extreme fraudsters can get nowadays.

One recent occasion that we want to share is a story of a mobile developer that started to work with a new affiliate. This developer — whose name will not be disclosed due to security reasons — has been working with FraudScore for more than three years, and they score all campaign traffic with FraudScore’s antifraud solution.

Before the developer started working with a new traffic source, they completed a test run of the affiliate. The test traffic was good, and the high-quality conversions met the requirements. The developer decided to sign up the affiliate, and established the campaign start day.

On the first day of the campaign, the developer received an alert from FraudScore. The fraud level was alarming, and it was recommended that the developer take a look at the traffic quality report.

FraudScore detected that 99% of all conversions from this new affiliate were fraudulent! The affiliate provided 170k+ conversions, 99% of which were fraud. Despite the fact that the test conversions were real and coming from real users, the actual campaign traffic was quite different.

The developer used FraudScore’s report to understand the situation:

1) 99% of conversions had no in-app events. This means that there were no real users.

2) 87% of conversions were marked with “duplicate build” as the fraud reason. That is a sign of emulators, as the Android build is not verified as real.

3) Approximately 70% of conversions had symptoms of bot traffic (e.g., “duplicate IP” and “duplicate device”). These fraud reasons mean that conversions were not made from a real user device, so there is a high probability of bot traffic.

The developer immediately stopped the traffic from this source. In a couple of hours, thanks to FraudScore’s algorithms, a fraudulent affiliate was dealt with. The developer avoided losing money, and managed to take action in time.

This case demonstrates that even after a positive and promising test run, a company must still keep a close eye on traffic quality. This particular affiliate wanted to trick the advertiser by providing real conversions for the test, but when it came to real offers and campaigns, almost all of the sent traffic was completed via fraudulent algorithms and methods. That affiliate must have hoped that the ad fraud would go unnoticed, and that the advertiser would not be checking the traffic so thoroughly given that the tests were indisputably good.

This case is out of the ordinary due to the amount of fraud that was provided by the affiliate. However, one can see how extreme and crooked fraudsters can be. FraudScore will continue to share such examples, and we hope that companies will come to conclusion that an antifraud tool is necessary for doing business in online ads.

  • I recommend to use FraudScore anti fraud solution. It really helps to avoid unnecessary risks and to cut off the fraud at the very beginning. Well done, guys!
    Olga Saburova, Account Manager at MobioNetwork
  • There are lots of manuals about earning money over the internet. Most of them are about making fraudulent mobile installs. As soon as new “manual” comes out we see peaks of low quality traffic. But as soon as we began using FraudScore service we cut managers who were working on checking traffic quality two times. Using their convenient report with set of filters, you can generate different type of reports showing you the traffic quality in different contexts. This helped us to find lots of cheaters and poor quality affiliates.
    Nickolay, CEO at Mobiaff.ru
  • FraudScore’s fraud monitoring system is particularly useful in this regard as it allows daily check on affiliates conversions and indicates the level of fraud detected for each conversion. The fact that the system not only monitors normal desktop traffic, but, also tracks and accurately reports on mobile traffic in relation to Emulators, VPN’s, Bot farms and IP pattern recognition allows us to make informed decisions when reviewing assigned affiliate caps and encouraging more traffic.
    Darren Williamson, Managing Director at CAN
  • FraudScore has easy to handle and fast APIs which permitted us to integrate fraud analysis findings into our own dashboards. Their own interface is very intuitive and offers infinite possibilities in terms of filtering and digging into data. FraudScore team is very receptive to users feedback and continuously introduces improvements to their product.
    Luis Barrague, COO at Headway Digital, Spain
  • For more than two years of working with mobile traffic we have been tried a lot of anti-fraud services offered by the market. Therefore we can confidently say that the truly worthwhile solution is the FraudScore. Strong technologies, convenient interface and the most effective support – it’s all about FraudScore. Since we started collaboration with this service the volume of fraud traffic in Zorka.Network has been almost reduced to zero.
    Oleg Gorelik, Affiliate Director at Zorka.Network
  • Fraudscore has been our first line of defense against measuring questionable traffic. As the mobile digital advertising landscape continually expands, it becomes complex as it relates to user attribution measurement. The need for precise data has never been more important to the success of our business and our clients marketing efforts. FraudScore’s engineers made integration seamless and user friendly. The user interface allows us to interpret the data correctly and in real-time to make the right decisions as it relates to protecting our clients brand integrity. I highly recommend their services.
    Moufid Al-Joundi, Curate Mobile
  • FraudScore has easy to handle APIs which permitted us to integrate fraud analysis findings into our own dashboards. Their own interface is very intuitive and offers infinite possibilities in terms of filtering and digging into data. FraudScore team is very receptive to users feedback and continuously introduces improvements to their product.
    Luis Barrague, HeadWay Digital
  • At Brisk Ads we take drastic measures to combat fraud, and with the help of FraudScore we are able to detect and eliminate any suspicious traffic. With the in-depth reports provided, we are able to identify any questionable sources; making sure that our clients only pay for legit and profitable users.
    Omar Mostafa, Brisk Ads