Ad Fraud Categorization and Detection Methods

This chapter provides a comprehensive review of Ad fraud in three major categories: placement fraud, traffic fraud, and action fraud, which are at different levels of online advertising. Placement fraud mainly focuses on the pages which displaying the Ads. For placement oriented fraudulent activities, they often modify publisher pages or the web pages showing on the users’ devices to increase impressions or clicks. Traffic fraud mainly tries to manipulate the network traffic to inflate the number of impressions generated from individual sites or placements. Action fraud targets users’ meaningful business actions, such as filling an online form or survey, completing an online purchase order, or use users’ previous actions or behaviors to re-target valuable customers. For each type of fraud, we will also review detection methods and approaches for online Ad fraud prevention.