A new report from mobile measurement company Adjust reveals that in the first quarter of this year, mobile ad fraud nearly doubled over the same period in 2017.
Adjust measured 3.43 billion app installs and over 350 billion events, processing and analyzing 125 terabytes of data per day from 20,000+ apps over the first three months of 2018.
Adjust's Fraud Prevention Suite rejected 7.3 percent of all paid installs, the most common being SDK spoofing (37 percent), click injection (27 percent), faked installs (20 percent) and click spam (16 percent). SDK Spoofing has rapidly gained momentum and become fraudsters' preferred scam technique. Click injection affects only Android devices and helps explain why Adjust rejects twice as many app installs on Android compared to iOS devices.
eCommerce is now the most affected sector, accounting for two-fifths of the total installs rejected by Adjust. The other top mobile app categories most affected after eCommerce are games with 30 percent, followed by travel apps with 10 percent.
