Is there a cure for fraud?

Believe it or not, but we, as fraud fighters, are always glad to hear when market leaders announce new measures to stop (rather than to detect) efforts of stealing your ad budget.

What makes us who we are is the fact that we stay alert and attentive to everything that’s going on. So, let’s have a closer look at some of the above mentioned features. They are relatively new, but we, in Fraudscore had enough time to understand if they really work.

No chance for SDK spoofing?

This type of fraud has evolved rapidly in the last year only to become one of the biggest issues in digital advertising. Fraudsters have been successfully imitating installs with almost no chance of being detected by taking control over real, wide-spread devices owned by unsuspecting and most likely law-abiding users through vulnerable SDKs.

It was a tough challenge, but eventually guys from Adjust came up with a signature hash to sign SDK communication package as a response.

“Ultimate solution? Probably not”, comments FraudScore’s CTO Vitaly Khamin. He draws attention to “reasonably secure hash” and believes that it’s really going to work for Adjust’s clients since there are other platforms that don’t have anything like this and remain easy meat. But as soon as they introduce them, which won’t be too long, fraudsters will learn to get round that as well.

Anyway, it’s a good idea to regularly update your SDKs. We are always in support of those solutions that make life difficult for those who cheat and steal.

The end of click injections?

In his other article Andreas Naumann tells us about the click injections problem – the technique that bad guys use to intercept organic conversion. They benefit from the fact that the closest click to the end of install counts.

The solution that Andreas described seemed even more simple and reliable. Google keeps information about the time when each download was really started and finished. So you just need to compare.

“Sounds good”, says FraudScore’s CPO Roman Safonov, “but our clients don’t get such data from attributors. So we, as an anti-fraud company, don’t have it either”. He assumes that all fake installs should be probably – thanks to this Google feature – excluded automatically from the attribution data. “Unfortunately, our studies of real cases concerning time-to-install still can’t prove that”, Roman adds.

So, maybe the solution doesn’t work as effectively as it could yet. But as a FraudScore client you shouldn’t worry about that. That is our job to keep an eye on the latest trends in fraud prevention.

To sum it up

It’s sad to say, but not every solution to prevent fraud proves to be as magical as it seems. Besides, every step like this makes fraudsters find alternative methods to lighten your wallet. It is an everlasting battle. The thing you can be sure of is that FraudScore is not going to give up any time soon. New challenges only make us stronger, and that’s a case of real prevention. Because obstacles do prevent us from getting bored.