Events-Related Fraud

A type of mobile advertising fraud in which fraudsters simulate post-install events such as registrations, purchases, subscriptions, or in-app achievements to fraudulently claim CPA or CPI payouts.

Events-Related Fraud is a form of mobile advertising fraud in which attackers generate fake post-install events to make fraudulent users appear legitimate. Instead of simply faking app installs, fraudsters simulate valuable in-app actions such as account registrations, purchases, subscriptions, completed tutorials, game progression, or items added to a shopping cart.

Because many advertisers optimize campaigns around post-install events rather than installs alone, this type of fraud can be significantly more damaging than traditional install fraud.

According to FraudScore’s 2025 annual report, Events-Related Fraud accounted for 20.68% of all detected advertising fraud, making it one of the largest fraud categories in modern mobile performance marketing.

Fraudsters use automation, emulators, modified SDKs, or device farms to imitate legitimate user activity after an application has been installed.

Common techniques include:

  • Simulating user registrations.
  • Generating fake purchases or subscription events.
  • Completing onboarding flows automatically.
  • Triggering in-game achievements or level progression.
  • Sending forged in-app event data through manipulated SDKs.
  • Using bots to reproduce realistic user interaction patterns.

Since many CPA campaigns reward these high-value events, attackers can generate substantial fraudulent revenue while appearing to deliver quality users.

Why It Matters for Your Campaigns

Events-Related Fraud targets the performance metrics advertisers value most.

For businesses, it can lead to:

  • Fraudulent CPA payouts.
  • Artificially inflated conversion rates.
  • Corrupted optimization algorithms.
  • Misleading customer lifetime value (LTV) calculations.
  • Wasted advertising budgets.
  • Poor audience quality.
  • Incorrect business decisions based on manipulated performance data.

Because fraudulent post-install events often appear legitimate, they can remain undetected without advanced behavioral validation.

Preventing Events-Related Fraud requires validating the authenticity of post-install user behavior rather than relying solely on event completion.

Recommended best practices include:

  • Verify behavioral consistency after installation.
  • Analyze event sequences instead of isolated conversions.
  • Detect abnormal event timing and completion speed.
  • Correlate post-install events with Device Intelligence and behavioral analysis.
  • Validate SDK integrity before accepting event data.
  • Monitor repeat activity across multiple devices and accounts.
  • Use real-time fraud prevention platforms capable of evaluating every post-install event before attribution or payout.

Combining behavioral analytics, device verification, conversion validation, and machine learning provides the strongest protection against sophisticated post-install event fraud.