MEFTV speaks to Michael Paxman, Global Project Communications lead at Adjust who shares his views on the issue of mobile marketing fraud, and the extent to which it represents a problem for the industry, and how he sees the app ecosystem developing in the future.

“Mobile fraud is rampant, in part because it is very easy to execute. But fraudsters are very rarely caught, and even if they are, regulation hasn’t yet caught up with the issue. There is often no punishment for those found to be carrying out fraud, leaving them free to move onto exploiting the next app on their list.”

“But ad fraud can be solved, either through technical safeguards, like in the case of click injection, or through making the cost of entry too high and the routes in too complex. Click Validation is a new industry standard pioneered by Adjust, and requires ad partners share impressions to confirm each click has a matching impression.”

“This places a much higher demand on the potential fraudster to get an actual payout – instead of spamming a click, they must now also fake believable up-funnel impression metrics, with realistic ratios, all without their numbers standing out on a dashboard.”

“Ad networks, platforms and attribution providers have introduced a host of recent measures to curb ad fraud. But along these technical solutions, there also needs to be a more collaborative, knowledge-based understanding and discussion of the problem – driven by the premise that you shouldn’t fund fraud just to make your numbers look good.”

Watch the full video below.