Advertising
From Pink Slips to Silent Sidelining: Inside adland’s layoff and anxiety crisis
How 2025 exposed true scale of Ad Fraud and what brands must fix in 2026
From AI-powered bots and deepfake ads to hidden mobile app schemes and CTV manipulation, ad fraud in 2025 moved beyond clicks and impressions, forcing Indian brands to rethink accountability, governance, and full-funnel trust ahead of 2026.
From hidden bots to fake trust, what made 2025 particularly dangerous was not the volume of fraud alone, but its invisibility. (Image source: Unsplash)
In 2025, ad fraud stopped behaving like a detectable anomaly and started functioning like a parallel economy. Campaigns appeared efficient, dashboards looked reassuring, and cost metrics often improved, yet brands quietly lost money, trust, and signal integrity. Fraud was no longer confined to suspicious websites or low-quality traffic. It embedded itself inside premium inventory, mainstream platforms, and trusted formats, reshaping how digital marketing risk must be understood.
What made 2025 particularly dangerous was not the volume of fraud alone, but its invisibility. Traditional warning signs-sudden traffic spikes or abnormally high impressions became less reliable. Instead, fraud operated across the funnel. An impression could look legitimate, a click could appear human, and yet conversions, attribution, and even brand lift could be artificially engineered downstream.
“Ad fraud in 2025 proved to be non-linear, it no longer sits at a single stage of the funnel,” said Dhiraj Gupta, CTO and co-founder of mFilterIt. “What looks clean at the impression level can still manipulate conversions, attribution, and outcomes downstream.”
According to him, India loses Rs 30 crore every single day to digital ad fraud. That’s Rs 10,000 crore annually. Globally, the number stands at $100 billion, rising toward $172 billion.
In a market where over 50% of media spends are digital, and projected to reach 90%, only 5% of advertisers demand independent measurement or verification. This single gap, experts warn, is enabling a national-scale leakage of money, data, and trust.
This shift marked a turning point. The industry’s long, held assumption, that clean inventory at the top of the funnel guarantees clean outcomes, no longer held true.
How fraud evolved in 2025
One of the most significant changes in 2025 was the rapid evolution of bot traffic. AI-powered bots began mimicking real human behaviour with remarkable accuracy, replicating scrolling patterns, mouse movements, and browsing flows. These bots blended seamlessly into normal traffic, making them extremely difficult for legacy fraud-detection tools to identify.
Deepfake ads and synthetic media added another layer of complexity. Fraudsters created AI-generated influencers, fake brand ambassadors, and fabricated testimonials that closely resembled legitimate campaigns. These were widely used to promote fraudulent investment schemes, counterfeit products, and misleading lead-generation offers, often passing basic platform checks while exploiting consumer trust.
Connected TV (CTV) and video inventory also became prime targets. As advertisers shifted larger budgets into high-value CTV environments, fraud followed. Fake devices, app bundling, and hidden ad delivery allowed bad actors to siphon spend from premium campaigns with minimal detection.
India felt these shifts sharply.
Large-scale mobile app fraud, such as SlopAds, exposed how over 200 Android apps generated billions of hidden impressions and clicks while avoiding standard detection. With Android dominance and rapid app adoption, high-growth markets like India proved especially vulnerable.
At the same time, deceptive advertising flourished on major global platforms that dominate India’s digital ecosystem. Internal disclosures globally suggested a significant share of ad revenue was tied to scam or banned content. In India, this translated into fake investment ads, financial fraud, and misleading performance campaigns targeting first-time digital users at scale.
Fraud performance metrics
Perhaps the most unsettling reality of 2025 was that many fraudulent campaigns “worked” on paper. Metrics such as CTR, installs, leads, and even conversions often appeared healthy. Affiliate marketing programs delivered volume. Branding campaigns showed reach and frequency.
Yet, as Gupta noted, even walled gardens were not immune. While fraud rates inside closed ecosystems may appear lower, the wallet impact at scale is significant. Attribution systems, affiliate payouts, and frequency controls became silent leakage points. An ad “viewed” meant little unless it was verified as being seen by a real human, and even then, whether delivery safeguards were honoured remained an open question.
“Performance metrics without provenance are meaningless,” said Suyash Lahoti, partner at Wit & Chai Group. “Impressions, installs, leads, and even conversions can now be manufactured at scale.”
What brands must change in 2026
As brands plan for 2026, the lesson is clear: ad fraud is no longer a campaign-level issue. It is a governance and capital allocation problem.
First, brands must move away from blind trust in surface metrics. Optimising purely for reach, cost efficiency, or vanity KPIs increases the risk of funding invisible ecosystems that deliver no real business value. Full-funnel accountability: spanning impression quality, attribution integrity, and outcome validation—must become non-negotiable.
Second, fraud prevention must move upstream. It cannot sit solely with media execution teams. It must be embedded into how budgets are sanctioned, how supply paths are chosen, and how agencies and platforms are held accountable. Media buying should be treated like financial investment, with defined risk thresholds, continuous audits, and transparency that can withstand scrutiny from finance and compliance teams.
Third, brands need smarter detection systems. AI-driven models that analyse behaviour patterns in real time are essential to identify sophisticated invalid traffic. Monitoring red flags, such as unexplained geographic spikes, high CTRs with low conversions, repeated device signals, and abnormal session behaviour—should be standard practice, not exception handling.
Finally, brands must slow down unchecked automation. As AI-generated fraud becomes more human-like, the next wave will not trigger obvious alarms. Dashboards will look healthy. The danger will lie in distortion, not disruption.
Nikhil Rangnekar, CEO at MediaCircle suggest brand implement AI-driven detection and use advanced machine learning models that analyze large-scale traffic patterns and behaviors in real-time to spot anomalies that indicate SIVT.
Looking ahead, trust will be the most valuable currency in digital media. The brands that outperform in 2026 will not be those that spend more, but those that demand transparency, proof, and defensible media strategies.
“If a media plan cannot be clearly explained and defended to a CFO, an audit committee, or a board,” Lahoti warned, “it should not be approved.”
After 2025, the message is unmistakable: growth will belong to brands that stop trusting appearances—and start enforcing accountability end to end.
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