User Acquisition Fraud

Mobile User Acquisition Fraud or UA Frau is the process of sabotaging the effort of advertisers to acquire the users they meant to acquire. User acquisition fraud ultimately results in fake traffic, downloads or installs generated by bots or humans. There is no increase in genuine app usage or ranking improvement for the play or app store.

However, scammers get more and more sophisticated in faking delivered traffic. Devices, app usage and engagement, geo targeting and much more can be faked without realizing that fraud traffic is delivered in advance. Taking a closer look into the raw data and relying on sophisticated tracking partners is a way to protect advertisers from being scammed.

Mobile user acquisition fraud can be seperated into two different categories:

Publisher Fraud:
Publisher fraud can contain fake human as well as bot traffic. Usually fraudulent publishers are connected to ad networks which sell the publishers ad space. The ad networks usually don’t know about the fact that they are connected to fake publishers due to insufficient quality standards or missing know how on fraud detection.

Ad Network Fraud:
For ad network fraud the scammers build fake corporate websites on which user acuqisition services are sold. Instead of being conntected to genuine publishers and delivering ads to real users, they deliver conversions through bot networks.