Pfar from a quarter of the money brands spend on online advertising currently falls into the hands of scammers, says independent research firm Juniper Research (“ Quantifying the Cost of Ad Fraud: 2023-2028 », Juniper Research Report, 2024).
Companies think that humans click on their ads, but the clicks that are counted will never bring them any purchases, because they actually come from robots installed in gigantic “click farms” by highly organized criminals, also capable of taking the control of connected televisions, computers or smartphones without the knowledge of their owners, to then make them click night and day on advertising screens…
More and more large American companies are realizing the extent of the problem and are stopping investing in these online advertisements. Procter & Gamble, for example, radically cut its budget in 2018, reducing its spending by 200 million euros, with almost no impact on its sales. Companies as well-known as Uber, Chase Bank or eBay have also almost stopped paying for online advertising in recent years.
Globally, Juniper Research Report estimates that more than $80 billion [environ 74,71 milliards d’euros] were spent in 2023 by brands for advertising screens that do not allow any sales.
Scammers with various specialties
How is it possible ? The very complex organization of the online advertising market largely explains the fact that it is very difficult to control it. Companies entrust their advertising budgets to specialized platforms which intervene, via a whole cascade of intermediaries, on marketplaces where tens of millions of advertising spaces are auctioned off, via another cascade of intermediaries. . Operations between these thousands of actors take place at ultra-fast speeds, on the order of microseconds.
The study, in conjunction with Europol and the national gendarmerie, of six communities of cybercriminals who exchanged on discussion forums dedicated to advertising fraud shows how they organize themselves to embezzle funds (“ How cybercriminal communities grow and change: An investigation of ad-fraud communities », Jean-Loup Richet, Technological Forecasting and Social Change No. 174, 2022).
Scammers with various specialties, located all over the world, combine to earn more and more money. Some are technical experts, able to impersonate social media users or infect your connected camera so that it participates in viewing ads. Others make it appear that the robots behind these fake identities behave like normal humans by installing mobile applications or clicking on advertisements. Finally, others rent servers to host fake websites which recover the sums spent by advertisers.
You have 39.07% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.