Just a couple of years ago, CTV (Connected TV) was seen as a near-perfect digital advertising channel. High barriers to entry, premium inventory, and limited device access created the illusion of a fraud-proof environment.
But as budgets continue to grow, that perception is rapidly changing. Today, CTV is an ecosystem of millions of devices, dozens of intermediaries, and – inevitably – fraudsters who are quickly adapting classic schemes to this new, fast-growing channel that requires its own tailored protection approach.
Why CTV has become attractive for fraud
The surge in investment is easy to explain: users are shifting from linear TV to streaming platforms, and advertisers are following their audiences. CPMs on CTV are significantly higher, budgets are larger – and mistakes are far more expensive.
The main pitfall: many advertisers still treat CTV as a “clean” channel and fail to apply the anti-fraud strategies they rely on in mobile and web environments. As a result, a portion of their budget simply disappears.
Key types of CTV fraud
Despite the unique nature of the channel, traditional fraud schemes are being adapted to fit the CTV ecosystem:
App and traffic source spoofing
Fraudsters routinely disguise low-quality or fake inventory as premium placements.
Fake impression generation
Thousands of bots fabricate large volumes of ad views, while advertisers pay for what appears to be real audience engagement.
Data manipulation
Fraudsters alter geo or timestamp data to bypass basic validation checks.
In practice, app spoofing often looks like “almost normal” traffic. For example, you might see a high share of devices running outdated browser versions – a metric that, on its own, can still fall within a normal range.
However, FraudScore detects accompanying anomalies such as app version abuse – a large number of installs with invalid or non-existent version numbers. This combination of signals is a strong indicator of traffic source spoofing and the imitation of installs from legitimate app distributions.
This is a common pattern in CTV fraud: individually acceptable signals that, when combined, reveal coordinated manipulation.
How to take control of CTV traffic
CTV traffic differs significantly from mobile and web: there are no standard user identifiers, data access is limited, and the ecosystem is built around devices rather than users. As a result, traditional fraud detection methods fall short.
To effectively control CTV traffic, it’s critical to:
- analyze behavior at the device level rather than the user level
- validate data consistency (device, app, geo, time)
- detect anomalies in impression patterns
- leverage server-side signals and log-level data
- build models tailored to CTV specifics and market dynamics
Across FraudScore-analyzed CTV conversions, 3% to 40% are fraudulent.
With FraudScore, you get more than just monitoring – you gain a complete transparency and real-time budget control system, before losses become systemic.
Protect your campaigns before losses become systemic – request a FraudScore demo and see how fraud is detected in real time!