Ad Fraud in 2025: How Advertisers Can Stay Ahead of the Threats

Impact of ad fraud goes far beyond lost clicks. Your stats may look fine on the surface, but you still may lack real leads. It may happen if your ads are “viewed” by bots and click farms, or if you collaborate with dishonest partners who use spoofed domains to impersonate themselves as premium publishers.

This issue doesn’t just drain budgets. It can mislead your strategy and hinder your growth. Read this article to find out how to protect your business from such cybercriminals.

5 Most Common Types of Ad Fraud in 2025

Modern fraudsters have become even more sophisticated than ever. They use AI-powered tools that can scroll, click, fill out forms, and even simulate voice interactions on calls. As an advertiser, you may become a victim of one of these ad fraud attacks:

1. Click fraud: Scammers use click farms to mimic genuine user clicks. It will drain your budget without producing real engagement.
2. Impression fraud: Shady ad networks or websites may display ads in hidden frames, stacked over other ads, or serve them to bots. While the ad was registered as shown, no one actually witnessed it.
3. Conversion fraud: These scammers mimic genuine conversions, such as completing forms or making purchases. In pay-per-call advertising, this can show up as spoofed numbers or bots making calls, so you qualify this conversation, and the affiliate gets its payout.
4. Domain spoofing: In this case, fraudulent websites may pose themselves as reputable publishers to sell ad space at inflated prices.
5. Mobile ad fraud: Fake installs, in-app events, or SDK manipulation in mobile apps that create the appearance of legitimate engagement, while in reality, there is no genuine prospect behind those actions.        

Some scammers combine real traffic from actual prospects and automated scripts to bypass traditional fraud detection tools. At the same time, the decline of third-party cookies results in limited visibility of user behavior. Thus, you need to become more creative when analyzing traffic patterns and detecting anomalies.

How Advertisers Can Protect Their Campaigns

Instead of reacting after scammers have already drained a budget, modern advertisers use a preventative approach. AI-powered tools play a key role in this, as they help you immediately identify suspicious activity.

For instance, an IP fraud score tool can help evaluate the risk of fraud in incoming traffic based on IP reputation. But it’s just the tip of the iceberg. To strengthen protection from ad fraud, you should:

• Monitor traffic patterns to catch unusual changes.
• Double-check the quality of every lead.
• Collaborate only with trusted partners.
• Use AI-driven solutions that automatically block abnormal activity.

Combined, these simple measures create a resilient defense that helps you stand against the scammers and maximize the impact of every dollar.

4 Best Practices To Prevent Ad Fraud

Although fraudsters are becoming more sophisticated, you are still the winner in this battle. The key to success is always working proactively. To stay ahead in the online advertising battle between you and scammers, implement these four best practices.

Audit Your Traffic Sources

It’s one of the simplest ways to combat any fraudster. Too often, advertisers blindly trust all their traffic sources. However, even previously trustworthy publishers can change their behavior overnight, shifting from a slow and honest lead nurturing approach to a shady and opportunistic business strategy.

Thus, you should verify the quality and authenticity of incoming traffic. We recommend that you look for the following red flags to prevent ad fraud:

• Unusual geolocations: If your brand only sells in North America, but you see a spike of clicks from Southeast Asia, that’s a red flag.
• Timestamps: Large clusters of clicks occurring within seconds or at odd hours may indicate bot activity.
• User behavior: Real people examine your website until they take some action. If traffic bounces in under a second or follows suspiciously identical paths, it’s likely fake.
• Publisher transparency: Always verify that your ads are served on the sites and apps you paid for, not on low-quality or spoofed domains.

Don’t forget to run regular in-depth audits that will analyze every aspect of the traffic. It also helps ensure that your campaigns reach real users who are genuinely interested in your products.

Validate Every Lead

Even though ad and affiliate networks thoroughly vet their publishers, it’s still wise to double-check every lead to ensure that you get attention from real users.

It is particularly relevant for advertisers who are running complex affiliate campaigns and dealing with pay-per-call leads, as they have dozens of benchmark criteria that can still be spoofed.

That’s why wise advertisers use advanced monitoring tools and integrate them with the CRM, marketing automation software, and call tracking systems to track every aspect of leads' behavior. It helps them quickly identify suspicious activity.

Later, they analyze each questionable case in detail. If they see that all fraudulent leads originate from the same source, they stop working with this partner immediately.

Use IP Fraud Scoring Tools

IP quality score check allows you to evaluate individual IP addresses in under a second by analyzing common fraud patterns.

• Proxy or VPN usage: When users hide behind anonymizers, they have something to hide. Therefore, traffic from VPNs or proxies is typically flagged as potentially suspicious.
• Data center IPs: IPs associated with data centers are often flagged as potential bot traffic.
• Historical reputation: IIPs with a history of suspicious activity receive a higher risk score.
• Geolocation anomalies: IPs with geolocation inconsistent with the expected location are flagged as potentially suspicious.
• Device inconsistencies: Unusual connection types (e.g., mobile proxies) that may indicate automated traffic

One way advertisers can reduce ad fraud is by verifying individual IP addresses for potential fraudulent activity. Such tools evaluate indicators such as proxy or VPN usage, data center IPs, historical risk, and geolocation anomalies, helping you identify suspicious traffic before it impacts your campaigns.

Use Third-Party Monitoring Tools

Even if you already have robust in-house analytics, it may still not be enough to catch all forms of ad fraud. Using third-party software will give you a bird’s eye view of your strategy by connecting the results of all your other multi-channel activities under a single dashboard.

The most effective businesses use comprehensive tools that combine web analytics, email performance tracking, and call tracking under one roof. Such tools serve as an extra layer of protection that can help you identify sophisticated attacks early. They cross-check impressions, clicks, and conversions with advanced AI-powered algorithms.

Conclusion

Ad fraud has become a significant threat to online businesses. The key challenge for you, as the advertiser, is to create omnichannel sales funnels. Meanwhile, the more complicated the user journey is, the harder it becomes to detect malicious activity early.

This is especially true for complex lead strategies, such as pay-per-call marketing, where you need to closely monitor dozens of interconnected factors, including traffic quality, engagement patterns, caller locations, and behaviour during the conversation.

To achieve a successful campaign optimisation and protect yourself from fraudsters, stay aware of the latest cybersecurity trends and track even the smallest changes in your traffic. It’s better to spend extra efforts on traffic verification than to let cybercriminals compromise your campaign results. Additionally, strong project management skills, such as those developed through a PMP Certification, can help teams structure fraud prevention processes more effectively.