APAC mobile ad fraud to hit US$56 billion by 2022

Mobile ad fraud in Asia-Pacific is expected to exceed US$18 billion this year and reach a whopping US$56 billion by 2022, according to new research from ad fraud prevention specialist TrafficGuard and Juniper Research.

The white paper claims that as fraudsters become more sophisticated in avoiding detection, the problem will only balloon massively in APAC, particularly the techniques of SDK spoofing and install app farms.

Mobile ad fraud is currently a huge problem in markets with high app usage, such as China, South Korea, Indonesia, Japan and Australia. The report suggests that by 2022 one in 10 app installs are expected to be fraudulent. But fraudsters are likely to shift their attention to markets with high mobile penetration but less maturity around ad fraud detection, like Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, India and the Philippines.

To combat this, advertisers will need a multi-pronged prevention plan that is increasingly driven by machine learning, said Luke Taylor, TrafficGuard founder and COO.

“For such a lucrative industry, digital advertising has been falling behind when it comes to security,” he added. “Existing fraud mitigation solutions are merely scraping the surface, and the lack of anti-fraud specialists is unsettling.”