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Thanks! Over time this is likely to work less well, as it becomes more worthwhile for fraudsters to target your network. Off the top of my head, using a botnet to simulate traffic with a realistic range of UAs seems like it could allow a publisher to earn, say, 30% more revenue without you being too obvious. Overall, this would shift income from your honest publishers to your cheating publishers.

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Definitely true. Hopefully the folks who have the skillset to build a large OSS project, and build a network of fake traffic, would find other ways to spend their time with a higher return on investment than a 30% increment of their revenue.

But it will certainly happen, and hopefully we can continue to minimize it. We've generally seen fraud that looks like a site with no real traffic, and trying to generate 1000% returns, which is a much easier pattern to catch.

If you have any suggestions for ways we might improve our fraud tracking, definitely happy to hear them at eric@ our domain.

There are products designed to solve this problem: https://www.humansecurity.com/products/ad-tech-teams

Disclosure - I used to work for WhiteOps (now known as Human Security apparently).

There are definitely products for this problem; it's a huge business. But they're not products that are compatible with EthicalAds' privacy-first JS-optional model.

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