Ad Age recently exposed a digital advertising fraud scheme that skimmed tens of millions of dollars from large advertisers. The operation was sticking websites running lucrative video ads inside nearly invisible windows and placing those windows on legitimate sites via dirt cheap banner-ad buys. This allowed the fraudsters to piggyback off of the traffic of real sites when the ads they were supposedly displaying were hidden in unseen windows.
In fact, the fraudsters got away with it for months, in part, by fooling a number of anti-fraud products into believing they were seeing something legitimate. The online security firm Telemetry initially discovered the fraud,
"The operation is the most significant instance of ad fraud seen to date by Telemetry, Mr. Rushton said, who co-founded the firm in 2009. It hit the most advertisers, the most exchanges, and importantly, earned the most revenue of any operation Telemetry has witnessed. In all, at least 75 advertisers -- including Ford, Coke and McDonald's -- spent money on these ads. In the past month alone, at least $10 million was wasted, according to Telemetry."
It is miraculous to think that advertisers would continue to write checks for these video and banner ads when those companies can easily visit the sites to confirm if their ads are even being displayed. In reality, there were ways of tricking the advertisers to believe that their ads were being shown. A tiny window of 1x1 pixel can be expanded to run a video ad on loop for about 5 minutes before the screen reverts to a "normal" looking website.
"This scenario occurs each time a tiny window goes live, said Telemetry Exec VP Geo Carncross, who explained it as a way to trick those checking where their ads ran.
These sites -- including fitnessshared.com, sportspond.com, and videolulu.com -- all have prominent video players at the top, so if someone checked the anti-fraud products' reports, they would find the prominently placed video ads described in the reports."
This is just another example of how difficult it is to police ad fraud in the digital space, and how difficult it is to maintain a secure digital environment in this growing age.
Sources:
http://adage.com/article/digital/exposed-ad-fraud-schemes-completely-die/294296/
http://adage.com/article/digital/ad-fraud-operation-fools-detection-companies-nets-millions/293929/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfLzl72pdyY
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