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Education

More mobile payments, • Eighty-seven percent of Facebook ads
revenue comes from mobile.
more mobile fraud • By the end of 2019, mobile ads are
expected to represent 72 percent of all
U.S. digital ad spending.
By Nicholas Cucci • Eighty-eight percent of mobile users
Fluid Pay LLC increased their use of mobile coupons in
the past three years.
his won't come as a surprise, but mobile devices are now • Over 50 percent of retailers feel they are
the preferred way to access the Internet and make pay- not prepared to deal with any type of
ments. Nearly 80 percent of people in the United States mobile fraud.
T own a smartphone, according to Forbes magazine. This
continued rise and growth of mobile payments has made companies Popular types of mobile fraud
shift strategies to a mobile-first approach.
Along with this massive increase in mobile
Here are several examples of the rise of mobile from app development devices has come a ripple effect in fraud.
company CitrusBits: One popular fraud trend is click flooding,
• Mobile devices account for 53 percent of paid search clicks. also called click poaching. This type of fraud
aims to poaching organic users. When an
• Google drives 95 percent of all U.S. paid search clicks on mobile. unpaid user installs a new app, a series of
clicks takes place that falsely attribute the
action to that of a paid ad. This causes the
advertiser to pay a click fee per user that the
advertiser shouldn't be paying for it. This
also disrupts analytics because the amount
of organic incoming traffic becomes grossly
overstated.

This combination is detrimental to marketing
plans and budgets. Typically, organic users
who run across your advertisement are more
high-quality users who are inclined click
through to see a service or product.

Another mobile fraud or poaching trend
occurs only on Android devices and exploits
the Install Broadcasts feature. This is where
all existing apps on a phone are notified
when a new
app is being installed. Scammers create new
free apps, and when people download them,
the apps send a series of clicks to networks
before the install is complete. Through this,
the fraudster receives credit, and gets paid for
what is more than likely an organic install.

Yet another popular fraud trend on mobile
devices is SDK spoofing. This is a bot-driven
strategy whereby a bot (malware) hides on
the app to generate a series of simulated
ad click, install and engagement signals to
another location – but no real install occurs.
CitrusBits found that in the first quarter of
2018 alone, 37 percent of all rejected installs
were from SDK spoofing. This is becoming
increasingly popular in 2019.

Not surprisingly, Stripe found that fraud
rates increase during the holidays and
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