Fraud

In affiliate and iGaming media buying, fraud covers any activity designed to fake conversions or hijack attribution — bot installs, forced clicks, fake registrations, stolen credit cards used for deposits, or click injection that steals credit for organic users. The common thread is that the advertiser pays for value that never existed, while the fraudster collects payouts or attribution credit that belongs to someone else.

Media buyers meet fraud from both sides: advertisers accuse sources of sending fake traffic, and buyers themselves get burned by fraudulent placements inside DSPs and ad networks. Payouts get held, whole cohorts get clawed back, and accounts get terminated retroactively. Watch conversion-time distributions, deposit-to-registration ratios, and device fingerprints — abnormally uniform patterns usually surface fraud before the advertiser's risk team does, which is the cheaper way to find out.