Authored by Abhishek Tiwari, Global Business Head, NetSetGo Media
Mobile advertising in India’s burgeoning digital economy is a power player. There are over 700 million smartphone consumers and mobile advertisement spending that can reach more than ₹25,000 crore in 2025. Brands do not mind splurging huge amounts of money to reach users. The mobile ad boom also has its shady side: it is the spread of ad fraud. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) India puts the estimate of money lost to fraudulent activities at over ₹1,200 crore annually, draining campaign ROI and trust. For Indian marketers, combating this menace is no longer an option—it’s a survival issue.
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Mobile ad fraud is the intentional effort to trick advertisers into paying for non-legitimate interactions, including false clicks, installs, or impressions. Typical forms hitting India are click fraud where the use of automated bots or click farms generates illegitimate clicks on advertisements, in many cases sourced from areas where traffic is relatively cheap; install spamming when spammers rely on malware in order to pose as illegitimate app installs to distort performance; SDK spoofing that impersonates genuine apps for attributing nonexistent installs to an ad campaign; and proxy traffic that conceals user locations for impersonating affluent demographics. In a cost-per-click (CPC)-sensitive market such as India, where CPC prices tend to be low, even small-scale fraud can derage budgets and skew analytics.
India’s mobile ecosystem is particularly vulnerable because of its heterogeneous device ecosystem in which there are thousands of low-end Android devices running older versions of OS, rendering them easy targets for malware; regional complexity in which fraud methods are different across states; and increasing programmatic advertisements where automated purchasing of advertisements, though efficient, is opaque, and fraud detection becomes difficult. A 2023 TRAI study found that 35% of mobile ad interactions in India are fraudulent, with gaming, e-commerce, and fintech apps being top targets. For example, a Mumbai fintech startup lost ₹2 crore a month to spoofed loan app installs before it implemented anti-fraud solutions.
To fight such challenges, Indian advertisers are using advanced technologies such as AI & Machine Learning tools such as DataDome and Pixalate which monitor behavioral patterns to detect fraud in real time; Device Attribution Tools such as Adjust and AppsFlyer that employ multi-touch attribution to confirm authentic user journeys; Blockchain Verification whereby startups such as Affle utilize blockchain to generate unalterable logs of ad interactions; and Proxy & VPN Detection tools such as IPQualityScore that detect traffic hidden behind proxies.
Indian advertisers’ best practices are to collaborate with well-established networks that are IAMAI-certified, imposing stringent KPIs to track metrics such as Click-to-Install Time, using localized tools such as mFilterIt, ongoing monitoring through dashboards such as Google Analytics 4, training teams to identify fraud indicators, and working with industry associations such as the MMA India Anti-Fraud Task Force. Indian marketers’ top tools are AppsFlyer’s Protect360, Kochava, Google Play Integrity API, and Tune’s Fraud Buster.
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With UPI scams and hyper-localized fraud strategies gaining traction, India requires a multi-faceted solution. The government’s Digital India campaign must focus on more stringent ad regulation, while advertisers must invest in hybrid human-AI detection. In India’s mobile-first economy, trust is the ultimate currency. Protecting it requires vigilance and innovation. For Indian brands, mobile ad fraud is not merely a money leak—it’s a crisis of credibility. By embracing strong detection tools, industry collaboration, and being at the forefront of local fraud patterns, advertisers can protect their campaigns. In an environment where each rupee matters, active prevention is not only savvy; it’s crucial for long-term growth.
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