FRAUD "BEYOND BELIEF"

Dr. Augustine Fou has a PhD from MIT, teaches digital and integrated marketing at Rutgers and NYU, and was SVP, digital strategy lead, at McCann/MRM Worldwide. He is one of the world's leading authorities on fighting ad fraud. You might call him a Fou fighter (shut up.)

Dr. Fou did some mind-blowing calculations on ad fraud this week. But before we get to that, a little perspective.

It was about two weeks ago that ad industry aristocrats were patting themselves on the back and giving each other high fives over a report produced by the ANA (Association of National Advertisers) and their cyber-security consultants that said that ad fraud would drop 10% this year from about 7.2 billion dollars to about 6.5 billion.

As I have said innumerable times, all statements about ad fraud are guesswork dressed up as science. They are nothing but assumptions piled on top of assumptions. The estimators proudly assume they know how to detect and measure every type of ad fraud. This is a foolish conceit. Anyone who takes what these guys say seriously is a chump.

This week, two new shocking flavors of ad fraud were uncovered that expose all the previous estimates of ad fraud for the bullshit they are.

First, Google pulled 40 apps from its Play store. These apps had been downloaded 36 million times. Security firm Check Point revealed that these apps carried an illegitimate ad clicking function which Forbes said, "might be the biggest Android ad fraud ever."

Google has a technology called Bouncer designed to protect against such fraud. But because the bad guys are always ahead of the good guys Google was unable to detect it.

The fraud is known as "Judy." To give you a sense of its size, Dr. Fou calculated that it was capable of creating 1 billion fraudulent ad impressions a minute. It has been operating undetected for over a year. Do that math.

But that ain't nuthin'. Check Point also uncovered an ad fraud operation called "Fireball" that has infected 250 million computers worldwide as well as 20% of corporate networks. You can read about Fireball here.

According to Dr. Fou, Fireball is capable of creating - you ready? - 30 billion fraudulent ad impressions a minute. I'm going to repeat that -- 30 billion a minute.

Dr. Fou called the "Judy" and "Fireball" operations "fraud on such a massive scale it is beyond belief."

And who's buying these trillions of fraudulent ad impressions? That would be your company's digital marketing experts.

The more arrogantly confident the ad tech industry and its vacuous cheerleaders in agencies get about their "progress" to control ad fraud, the more laughable they look. And the more ridiculous advertisers look for buying into their horseshit.

(By the way, who's in charge of naming these fraud operations? Fireball is awesome. But Judy? C'mon.)

Detection Or Deception?

This article by Dr. Fou may be a little challenging for the non-tech oriented, but it will still give you a general idea of how unreliable reports from cyber security and fraud detection "experts" can be. I, of course, understood every word of it.

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