Billions lost to brands as AI-powered ad fraud exploits every click

Hans India

20 hours ago

The Economic Times says the illicit supply chain is 'fuelled by advanced bots, airtight automation, and low-cost black-market engagement'.
Industry professionals in adtech are seeing 'a 86% YoY surge in invalid bot traffic by late 2024, with sources tracing this activity to automated crawlers and scrapers such as GPTBot and ClaudeBot skewing campaign performance and eroding trust throughout the digital marketing fraud ecosystem,' a new release said.
Big names have suffered collateral damage, with one major OTT platform said to have seen 100% bot traffic and a 52% click through rate (CTR), clear signals of inauthentic activity.
'It has become very easy for fraudsters to customize a programmatic ad fraud campaign to pump up high-level engagement metrics such as reach and conversions,' Shailesh Dhuri, CEO, Decimal Point Analytics, told the publication. 'In fact, you will really only see a campaign's effectiveness once you filter out numbers from these bots.'
Cyber criminals are simulating organic behaviour, such as scroll patterns, dwell times on elements, jitter and click timestamp patterns and device fingerprint characteristics, to avoid 'traditional bot and fraud filtering mechanisms.' Others are finding that some analytics dashboards now include 'fraud-adjusted views to surface ads viewed by bots and provide clear insights into real ROI'.
AI-led digital fraud is a common weapon in the ad fraud arsenal, but click-jacking and AI is now being weaponized to create deepfake ads, site cloners, fake 'news,' and, especially popular among scammers, fake influencer content.
Celebrity videos created by Generative AI—which purport to be endorsements, movie promotions or other forms of marketing communications—are already pasting together scam campaigns that are beating detection tools and duping consumers into engaging with sponsored content.
In China, Egypt, Bangladesh, Kenya, and other markets, 'brand loss due to ad fraud' are booming. A thousand reel views on Instagram, for example, can cost an ad fraud 2025 just about a dollar, The Economic Times points out.