India leads mobile ad fraud across Asia: Report

With a rate of 62%, mobile ad fraud is a major challenge in India, says a new report.

In fact, India beats all other Asian countries when it comes to advertising fraud, with Indian marketers spending around 20% of their advertising budget on ad fraud. 

About 95% of the respondents feel that lack of penalties and transparency in industry regulations has helped these companies get away with fraud, US-based non-profit organisation Mobile Marketing Association  said in its new report “Ad Fraud Benchmark”.

Cookie stuffing (74%), adware traffic (65%), data fraud (61%), and ad injection (54%) are the major type of ad frauds committed in the country. 

“In India, the awareness on ad fraud risks is very low with almost a fifth of the marketers being unclear of their ad fraud budget and majority of them believing that fraudulent activities will only increase,” said Moneka Khurana, Country Head, MMA India.

The report, which was published in collaboration with a research firm Decision Lab, shows that only 37% of respondents are aware of blockchain solutions and their application in fraud prevention. About 9 out of 10 marketers feel that there is a scope for improvement in ad fraud prevention methods. Around 90 stakeholders participated in the study. 

“Marketers must understand the potential of technologies such as Blockchain that can help solve issues related to fraud and create security and transparency in mobile marketing ecosystem.” Khurana added.

Around 48% of Indian marketers agreed that they use an external ad fraud prevention vendor. However, 11% say they don’t use any solutions currently, but they are planning to develop their own solutions and the 13% accepts that they don’t have a solution yet nor have any plans to get one.