Ad fraud taxonomy and prevention mechanisms

Abstract

In this chapter, we first propose a taxonomy to summarize fraud in online digital advertising. The taxonomy provides a complete view of major fraudulent activities in answering questions related to Who does What to Whom, and How. The proposed fraud taxonomy includes three major categories: placement oriented fraud, network traffic oriented fraud, and action oriented fraud. Placement oriented fraud mainly intends to manipulate or modify publisher pages or modify the web pages showing on the user’s devices in order to increase the number of impressions or clicks. Traffic oriented fraud generates fake traffic to inflate the number of impressions or clicks generated from individual sites or placements. Action oriented fraud aims to target users’ actions in order to generate revenue.