Mobile ad fraud is in the midst of a period of rampant innovation.
That was the takeaway of a recent report from app marketing firm Adjust, which found that the rate of fake app-installs, clicks, attributions and other mobile scams doubled in the past year alone. The company said around 7.3 percent of the 3.4 billion app-installs and 350 billion interactions it monitored in the first quarter of the year showed evidence of fraud.
Adjust’s ad fraud specialist, Andreas Naumann, said the spike was the result of bad actors creating new ways of tricking marketers, giving those fraudsters a leg up in the constant cat-and-mouse fight.
“2017 was the year of innovation and evolution for fraudsters,” Naumann said. “A lot has happened.”
Much of that innovation involves a method of faking app installs called SDK spoofing
