The State of Mobile Fraud [H1, 2019]

Fraud has been polluting the mobile marketing space for several years now, and shows no signs of slowing down. In this high stakes arms race, bad actors seeking a piece of the increasingly larger mobile ad spend pie and protection solutions, especially attribution platforms, are battling it out.

The attack-counter attack dynamics of fraud dictate that it comes in waves. Last summer, we experienced an all-out bot attack and alarmingly high fraud rates. Since then, the numbers have declined as protection solutions have evolved, sending fraudsters back to the drawing boards.

However, in recent months, based on an analysis of 2.5 billion installs of 9,500 apps, we can see the fraud rate rising once again: Why is fraud on the rise?

The latest evolution has seen fraud coming from device emulators (there’s no limit to scale with automated scripts) instead of physical device farms; from real SDKs and apps rather than fake ones; and from copying existing SDK messages to faking open-source operating systems using emulators, to name a few reasons.

Another significant development was the application of new and advanced fraud protection technology that is able to identify fraud after the install, or post-attribution.

AppsFlyer’s new, comprehensive State of Fraud report covers all the latest trends and threats, addressing the following questions, and many more:

What is the impact of post-attribution fraud?

What is the financial exposure of app install fraud?

Which apps, regions, and verticals are hardest hit?

Why is in-app fraud increasing, especially in gaming?