Is there a cure for fraud?

Believe it or not, but we, as fraud fighters, are always glad to hear when market leaders announce new measures to stop (rather than to detect) efforts of stealing your ad budget.

What makes us who we are is the fact that we stay alert and attentive to everything that’s going on. So, let’s have a closer look at some of the above mentioned features. They are relatively new, but we, in Fraudscore had enough time to understand if they really work.

No chance for SDK spoofing?

This type of fraud has evolved rapidly in the last year only to become one of the biggest issues in digital advertising. Fraudsters have been successfully imitating installs with almost no chance of being detected by taking control over real, wide-spread devices owned by unsuspecting and most likely law-abiding users through vulnerable SDKs.

It was a tough challenge, but eventually guys from Adjust came up with a signature hash to sign SDK communication package as a response.

“Ultimate solution? Probably not”, comments FraudScore’s CTO Vitaly Khamin. He draws attention to “reasonably secure hash” and believes that it’s really going to work for Adjust’s clients since there are other platforms that don’t have anything like this and remain easy meat. But as soon as they introduce them, which won’t be too long, fraudsters will learn to get round that as well.

Anyway, it’s a good idea to regularly update your SDKs. We are always in support of those solutions that make life difficult for those who cheat and steal.

The end of click injections?

In his other article Andreas Naumann tells us about the click injections problem – the technique that bad guys use to intercept organic conversion. They benefit from the fact that the closest click to the end of install counts.

The solution that Andreas described seemed even more simple and reliable. Google keeps information about the time when each download was really started and finished. So you just need to compare.

“Sounds good”, says FraudScore’s CPO Roman Safonov, “but our clients don’t get such data from attributors. So we, as an anti-fraud company, don’t have it either”. He assumes that all fake installs should be probably – thanks to this Google feature – excluded automatically from the attribution data. “Unfortunately, our studies of real cases concerning time-to-install still can’t prove that”, Roman adds.

So, maybe the solution doesn’t work as effectively as it could yet. But as a FraudScore client you shouldn’t worry about that. That is our job to keep an eye on the latest trends in fraud prevention.

To sum it up

It’s sad to say, but not every solution to prevent fraud proves to be as magical as it seems. Besides, every step like this makes fraudsters find alternative methods to lighten your wallet. It is an everlasting battle. The thing you can be sure of is that FraudScore is not going to give up any time soon. New challenges only make us stronger, and that’s a case of real prevention. Because obstacles do prevent us from getting bored.

  • 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