Dirty Tricks<\/strong>\r\n\r\nMuch of mobile fraud detection is about patterns. Take \u201cmean time to install\u201d (MTTI), a term coined by mobile analytics company Kochava to describe the average time it takes between when a user clicks to download an app and when that user launches it for the first time. A dating app generally has a low MTTI, sometimes just a few hours, whereas a finance app can have an MTTI of seven days or more.\r\n\r\nIf a large percentage of users coming from a certain subset of publishers within a specific ad network open a finance app within an hour, that\u2019s a clear indication that something isn\u2019t kosher.\r\n\r\n\u201cThere is a correlation between MTTI and the lookback window that an advertiser sets up to give credit to the network that drove the install,\u201d said Kochava CEO Charles Manning. \u201cThat\u2019s why it\u2019s important to establish a baseline MTTI so you can understand what a high-value user does and what their true intent is.\u201d\r\n\r\nApsalar noticed something similar when it examined the relationship between app-related clicks and conversions by geo. A country like Germany, for example, has a roughly 5% in-app conversion rate with nearly no click fraud to speak of. But in France it takes users 20% more clicks than users in Germany to convert, what Apsalar CEO Michael Oiknine referred to as an \u201coverclick rate.\u201d\r\n\r\nIn countries like India and Hong Kong, however, the overclick rate spikes astronomically. It takes users, or more likely bots, in those countries around 1,000% more clicks than users in Germany to reach the same conversion.\r\n\r\n\u201cSure, maybe people there are just clicking more,\u201d Oiknine said. \u201cBut to my mind, this kind of differential tells you that something is going on. To us it feels like a proxy for the level of fraud in the country.\u201d\r\n\r\nBut all it takes is a Google search to prove that mobile fraud is reaching an unfortunate maturity.\r\n\r\n\u201cType \u2018purchase web traffic\u2019 into your browser and you can see for yourself how many botnets are out there,\u201d Yarnall said. \u201cNow type in \u2018purchase mobile traffic\u2019 or \u2018purchase app downloads\u2019 and you\u2019ll get millions of results for people willing to sell. Some of those people will be honest and some are going to be really shady.\u201d\r\n\r\nIf you know what you\u2019re getting, that\u2019s one thing. But if you think you\u2019re buying a luxury sports car and all you\u2019re getting is a jalopy with a convincing new paint job, then it\u2019s fraud. That\u2019s how Kochava defines it, anyway.\r\n\r\n\u201cAny traffic that purports to be one thing and it actually something else \u2013\u00a0that\u2019s fraud,\u201d Manning said. \u201cIf you think you\u2019re buying non-incentivized traffic and there\u2019s incentivized ‘Candy Crush’ traffic in there, it might not be the ad network\u2019s fault, but it is fraud.\u201d\r\n\r\nWhen Kochava detects an outlier or mislabeled blended traffic, it alerts the advertiser. From there, the advertiser can decide to take action or not.\r\n\r\n\u201cWe proactively observe what\u2019s going on and we alert the customer when we see it happening,\u201d Manning said. \u201cBut we don\u2019t just drop the click. At the end of the day, we\u2019re a measurement company, not the jury. How you deal with the information we give you as an advertiser is your thing.\u201d\r\n\r\nFraud, mobile or otherwise, is a moving target and will remain so, said Yarnall, and every industry stakeholder needs to share responsibility.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou\u2019re never going to see a level set for non-human traffic. When a scammer sees something working, they\u2019ll take it and run with it as far as they can go \u2013\u00a0and then they move on,\u201d Yarnall said. \u201cIt\u2019s like an eternal game of whack-a-mole. The perpetrators of fraud are always going to be there.”[\/vc_column_text][\/vc_column][\/vc_row]","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"[vc_row type=”in_container” full_screen_row_position=”middle” scene_position=”center” text_color=”dark” text_align=”left” overlay_strength=”0.3″ shape_divider_position=”bottom”][vc_column column_padding=”no-extra-padding” column_padding_position=”all”…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9244,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[31,32,33],"class_list":{"0":"post-1663","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-press","8":"tag-charles-manning","9":"tag-data-science","10":"tag-fraud"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kochava.com\/ko\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1663","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kochava.com\/ko\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kochava.com\/ko\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kochava.com\/ko\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kochava.com\/ko\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1663"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.kochava.com\/ko\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1663\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":45771,"href":"https:\/\/www.kochava.com\/ko\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1663\/revisions\/45771"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kochava.com\/ko\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9244"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kochava.com\/ko\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1663"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kochava.com\/ko\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1663"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kochava.com\/ko\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1663"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"mobilefraud\"](\"https:\/\/adexchanger.comhttps:\/\/assets.kochava.com\/kochavacom\/uploads\/2015\/06\/mobilefraud.jpg\")
There\u2019s something fishy going on in China. According to mobile attribution company Apsalar, for every valid in-app purchase (IAP) made in China, there are 273 fraudulent ones.\r\n\r\nBut China isn\u2019t the only place with IAP problems. Taiwan sees 54 fake in-app purchases for every valid one, while Saudi Arabia clocks in at 24.6 and Israel and Hong Kong tie for 18. The digital goods were sold, but payment was never received, a fact Apsalar verified with both Google and Apple.\r\n\r\nIAP is just one of the new ways fraudsters are looking to game the mobile system.\r\n\r\nAs Forrester analyst Susan Bidel noted in a recent report titled “Fraud and Fat Fingers Distort the Mobile Advertising Landscape,” \u201cFraudsters not only apply techniques tested and proven in desktop advertising to the mobile web, but also fashion new strategies specifically to target the mobile app environment.\u201d\r\n\r\nOver the past year,\u00a0