Fraud is the new plague: it is practically everywhere, no matter the sphere, no matter the field of expertise. Affiliate marketers, though, might be the only category of people that faces it on a regular basis — and works tightly with it, trying to avoid the most intricate types of fraud. That’s where FraudScore comes in: this famous, high-precision fraud fighting platform analyzed various GEOs and types of traffic to deliver a revealing enough report, helping you predict the changes and tendencies in 2023. Join the bandwagon and breeze through the summarized version in our article!
Ad Fraud in 2022
The market reacts to the most subtle changes, and the three previous years were nothing but a mind-blowing rollercoaster, completely altering the rules in the advertising community — and, quite possibly, everywhere. The world has experienced several crises in the past three years, and 2022 was no exception — apparently, it even added to the shock and the turbulence in all imaginable spheres.
These conditions became a solid ground for many types of fraud, and Fraudscore, a high-precision platform that fights fraud, as you can deduce from the name, parsed and classified all dubious schemes that you may bump into on the Internet.
The first important revelation that you come across is the fact that almost 30% of all traffic was fraudulent in 2022. If you need a little more precision, we can divide further: Russia & CIS were leading fraudulent GEOs in web traffic, while China took the cake in the mobile traffic section.
This short introduction prepares for the details, namely, the monthly distribution of fraud. If we look closely at the graphs offered in the report, we will undoubtedly notice that April, August, September, October, November, and December underwent a splash of fraud, while in 2020 and 2021 the situation was completely different.
Such anomalous growth of fraud is an understandable reaction to an endless chain of calamities: one largescale disaster gave way to another, and nothing remained unharmed. Political turmoil, economic crises, ecological disturbances contributed to the current status quo.
This, however, is not the only explanation. Far less evident is the condition of the digital market itself. Its structure gets more complicated, new technologies step up, offering newer, more intricate and refined solutions, so simplistic approaches just won’t do. There’s a direct correlation between the digital market and fraudulent schemes: practically, a complex system can only be breached with a complex ‘tool’.
So, what options do fraudsters resort to in order to extort money? In 2022, attribution fraud took the lead:
click spamming (clicks executed for users who had not made them);
cookie stuffing (web cookies used to collect affiliate commission on goods they never sold)
appeared to be the most widespread fraud practices in affiliate marketing. According to the FraudScore report, the attribution fraud sector accounted for 18% of all fraud and experienced a 7% increase compared to the readouts of the previous years.
Number two in our improvised affiliate record chart is Proxy Fraud, also known as violations identified by the IP address (proxy servers used to conceal a fraudster's identity and location). It dominated in 2020 and 2021, but in 2022, the indicators significantly decreased from 29% to 16,8%.
IP Distribution Anomalies (various abnormalities connected with IP addresses) hold a solid third place. However, there's nothing special to report: if you waited for a swashbuckling buccaneer of fraud, no, it's not happening.
All in all, Attribution Fraud, Proxy Fraud, and IP Distribution Anomalies appear to be the top three categories of ad fraud, making up over 50% of the total detected ad fraud.
Mobile Traffic
Now, let's go deeper into specifics. According to Oberlo, the percentage of global mobile traffic has surged over the past decade, and as of November 2022, 60.28 percent of all web traffic came through mobile phones. For more information you can also check Datareportal.
Mobile traffic is widespread and thus extremely important nowadays, and the FraudScore readouts prove this point of view. Oddly enough, Attribution Fraud is also prevalent here, with a share of 23%. IP Distributions Anomalies follow with 16%, and Proxy Fraud, 15%, closes the circuit. As you can see, the lead categories remain the same for three years straight and don't face a single sway.
Web Traffic 2022
Web traffic is as predictable as they come, and you probably can already guess what kinds of fraud are reigning here.
So, the report claims that in 2022, the most significant contributors to global web ad fraud were blacklisted sources and IP distribution anomalies, accounting for 27% and 17% of all detected fraud, respectively.
The third most significant contributor was proxy fraud, making up 14% of the detected fraud. Although the leader in desktop ad fraud stays the same, the shares have peculiarly altered, thus demonstrating that fraudsters are shifting their efforts and concocting new schemes that eventually become more lucrative.
So, what do we expect in 2023?
The impeccably visualized FraudScore dynamics shows that Browser Fraud is inevitably growing: in 2021, its share was 4%, but by the end of 2022, it increased to 13%. Quite possibly, it’s not going to slow down the pace. Cyberscoop claims, scammers found out the way to implement malicious browser extensions to inject bogus ads into the results displayed on a search engine page, so the more users visit the fraudulent ad pages, the more money the perpetrators earn. This seemingly plain and artless scheme proves to be sufficiently sophisticated as even Microsoft researchers fail to identify who launched the campaign: evidently, it’s easier to learn the skill and build the extension rather than find out who is behind it.
The Proxy Fraud share, on the contrary, sharply dropped to just 14% (in 2021 it dominated the advertising market with 36%). Ostensibly, it will continue to decrease as technologies are constantly developing, the world is evolving and moving forward, introducing new applications, software and hardware for various purposes. For example, a certain variation of AI can detect a fraudster and effortlessly pinpoint their location. Simply put, it’s easier to contrive another way to extort money instead of wasting time on adjusting proxy servers.
Conclusion
We always hope for the best, but unfortunately, the data provided by the FraudScore report turned out to be a shock: the notorious stealing-and-faking trends are still in power, and this is at least one-third of global ad traffic. This tendency is holding strong: the amount of detected ad fraud has not dropped below 30% in the last four years. While it is not possible to fully predict the directions fraudsters might choose in the future, we can safely assume that this is no longer an opaque speculation but a solid idea, an expectation, which may or may not become a real intent. Global forecast strategies, techniques, and approaches are constantly developing, evolving, and altering, focusing on this or that aspect, trying to detect the most intricate scheme. However, they don't always help: fraud is Harry Styles of the Internet — it's ubiquitous, and it's advancing quickly. So keep that in mind when starting another campaign: we never know whether every participant in the online advertising market wants to detect, stop, and eliminate fraudulent traffic — so use the newly acquired information and make the necessary conclusions. Ciao!
