Every digital fraud scheme involved falsified or fabricated numbers

CMOs appear shocked when I ask them if they know whether they paid for billions of digital ad impressions or paid millions for Excel spreadsheets with numbers in the billions in them.

I am not joking.

Remember the first lawsuit that Uber won in 2021 ? The adtech vendor they were paying was knowingly fabricating data. "[An] employees wrote: “Guys it’s… time to spin some more BS to Uber to keep the lights on.” Uber's lawsuit against 100 other mobile exchanges for fraud continues. Adtech vendors currently selling remarketing services are literally inserting false data into their own customers' Google Analytics to make it appear that their campaigns drove sales, when those sales had nothing to do with its campaigns. At. All.

It's all make-believe.

Today comes news that "Unicorn social app IRL (In Real Life) to shut down after admitting 95% of its users were fake." https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/26/irl-shut-down-fake-users/ Similarly, a few months back "[She] exaggerated the number of customers that Frank, her now shuttered college financial planning company, actually had in a scheme to “fraudulently induce J.P. Morgan Chase to acquire” her start-up for $175 million." https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/04/business/charlie-javice-jpmorgan-fraud.html

These are no different than a month prior when "Ozy Media closed its doors in March 2023 after founder and CEO Carlos Watson was arrested and indicted on federal fraud charges. Ozy Media purchased traffic to drive pageviews for those articles, making them appear to be much more popular than they actually were. Ozy’s then-CFO [sent] the bank a fake contract between Ozy and an unidentified cable network purporting to be for a second-season renewal of one of the company’s shows.?In September 2021, the New York Times reported that Ozy falsified audience metrics and that COO Samir Rao had impersonated a YouTube executive on a call with prospective investor Goldman Sachs."?

In April 2023, Former Executives of Outcome Health Convicted in $1B Corporate Fraud Scheme https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-executives-outcome-health-convicted-1b-corporate-fraud-scheme "Outcome Health installed television screens and tablets in doctors’ offices around the United States and then sold advertising space on those devices to clients, most of whom were pharmaceutical companies. According to evidence presented at trial, Shah, Agarwal, and Purdy sold advertising inventory the company did not have [and] ... inflated metrics that purported to show how frequently patients engaged with Outcome’s tablets installed in doctors’ offices. The [fraud] scheme targeting Outcome’s clients began in 2011, lasted until 2017.

Last week comes news from the ANA that they found (1 in 4) or 21% of programmatic display impressions went to so-called MFA ("made for advertising") sites. What they didn't say was that 23% of all programmatic impressions went to "desktop" while the remaining 77% went to mobile/mobile apps. You do the math of 21%/23% of the display impressions going to websites went to MFA sites. When I say "the majority" of ad impressions purchased through programmatic channels are fake, even if legacy fraud detection vendors fail to detect them as IVT ("invalid traffic"), I mean the majority. As far back as 2015, AppNexus admitted that 92% of the impressions they sold were fraudulent. https://www.adexchanger.com/ad-exchange-news/6-months-after-fraud-cleanup-appnexus-shares-effect-on-its-exchange/ But none of their customers ever got refunds. Ad fraud has been a 90%+ problem since at least 2015.

More recently, we can see that ALL 19 cases of CTV fraud came from 100% fabricated bid requests. Mobile apps are sending fake CTV bid requests, in their attempt to earn much higher CPMs. Smart refrigerators and javascript code in ad slots were also observed fabricating fake bid requests pretending to be CTV inventory, to the tune of 12 billion per day. And that was just one of the fraud schemes.

Now, are you still still shocked when I ask whether you actually got ad impressions let alone got ads shown to humans? Or did you just pay for numbers in a spreadsheet or on a colorful dashboard? How would you know? Everything from your DSP to your ad server are self-reported. Smart advertisers have already upgraded to FouAnalytics to independently measure their digital marketing. They install FouAnalytics on-site tags on their landing pages and websites, so they can see IF clicks arrived and what the quality of those clicks were -- bot or not. They also use FouAnalytics in-ad tags to measure their ads, to see if the ads ever served and if so, where they ended up. FouAnalytics is the analytics platform for their digital media so they have an independent view of whether their digital campaigns are performing and more importantly if any of their digital ads and services they were sold were real.

Everyone already knows you can buy likes for Facebook, views for YouTube videos, followers for Instagram, etc. ALL of it is fabricated by automated/bot activity. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/01/27/technology/social-media-bots.html . Below is a tweet from today, from a researcher studying automated accounts and fake news on Twitter. Note this tweet mentions 725,946 fake accounts created on Twitter over a 2 month period. This is the scale of fraud and automated accounts that is a regular occurrence in "digital."

If you want to go even further back in time, read about Boris, Daniel, Asher, and Matt in Fraud As Old As Time... Digital's The Perfect Crime

This Noah's Ark is leaving port soon. Are you with us?

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