Jakarta, Gizmologi – AppsFlyer, an attribution, and marketing analytics company, discovered ad fraud that has been experienced by most mobile apps in Indonesia. Indonesia recorded a loss of nearly IDR 500 billion due to ad fraud in the second semester of 2021.
The survey results found that financial applications, aka fintech, were the type of applications that experienced the most serious impact compared to others. The findings are based on an evaluation of 2,000 mobile apps across verticals such as Fintech, Gaming, Shopping, F&B, and Entertainment.
“Indonesia is one of the two countries with the highest number of mobile ad frauds [mobile ad fraud] the highest in semester II/2021 in Southeast Asia, after Vietnam, with losses reaching nearly Rp500 billion [setara US$34,1 juta]” said APAC’s Senior Customer Success Manager AppsFlyer Lutfi Ansari, Wednesday (9/3).
AppsFlyer’s research also indicates that Fintech applications, particularly financial services, loan applications, and banking, have the highest average fraud rate, with a risk value of more than Rp350 billion (US$25 million). This happened in line with the increasing installation of financial applications and the presence of 15 digital banks in Indonesia.
“The fast digital transformation of the financial industry sector encourages more fraud perpetrators to take advantage of loopholes in the Fintech application realm, indicated by the level of fraud and higher average risk than other application categories,” he explained.
App Ad Fraud or Ad Fraud
Ad fraud itself is a complex phenomenon involving hackers, black market software, traffic brokers, and publishers who have not been properly educated about what happened. Usually, these incidents occur in countries with weak cybercrime enforcement.
Globally, the potential for ad fraud is estimated at US$42 billion of ad spend. The digital advertising spending budget will have increased from $280 billion in 2018 to $330 billion in 2019.
Also Read: Fintech Magical Collaboration with the Police to Strengthen Cyber Security in Indonesia
There are various ad fraud techniques, some of which are pixel stuffing, ad stacking, location fraud, cookie stuffing, user-agent spoofing, domain spoofing, and others. But the most common are nonhuman traffic and domain spoofing.
“The most common tactics employed are bot distribution, namely attempts to simulate ad clicks, installations, and in-app engagement. This includes impersonating legitimate users, thereby draining advertising resources for fake users that have no real profit value.
Another ad fraud tactic that is quite common is to send a large number of false click reports with the aim of taking advantage of the application’s marketing budget. Considering entering the second quarter of 2022, application marketers have started campaigning for their own platform.
The Indonesian version of this article can be read in Gizmologi.ID
