Anti-fraud solution

Anti-fraud solution is a system designed to detect and prevent fraudulent activity.

Fraudulent actions, such as generating fake clicks or installs, reduce ad effectiveness. As a result, return on investment (ROI) decreases and advertisers are exposed to financial losses. Fraud also distorts analytical data so it's hard to make informed business decisions.

Fraud types

According to FraudScore, a leading provider of solutions for analyzing and detecting fraud in mobile traffic, about 30% of iOS traffic and 40% of Android traffic is fraudulent.

The most common fraud types are:

• Click spam: Generating lots of clicks without actual ad interaction. Fraudsters use this technique to intercept organic traffic and attribute it to specific publishers.
• Click injection: Sending a fake ad engagement between an app download and its first launch. Using this method, fraudsters steal attributions from other sources.
• Device farms: Generating user actions by bots to simulate user activity and boost traffic.
• SDK spoofing: Sending fake requests from an SDK to the analytical system's servers. Fraudsters use this technique to generate fake installs and user events.

AppMetrica is integrated with the FraudScore system, which helps you detect click spam, click injection, and bots that mimic real users. To combat SDK spoofing, AppMetrica offers event verification solutions.

How to enable the anti-fraud solution

Our anti-fraud solution is a paid feature. For pricing information, see Additional options available for purchase.

To enable the anti-fraud feature:

1. From the side panel, go to Organization.

2. Select a pricing plan and click Settings.

3. Go to the FraudScore antifraud tab and select the amount of installs you need.

4. Click Proceed to purchase.

   Payment

   Instead of being charged for the entire month at once, you are charged daily. If the number of installs per month exceeds the limit you selected, fraud detection stops automatically.

5. Once you enable the feature, new and existing trackers will have the Antifraud by FraudScore option. Enable this option in the trackers where you want to check installations for fraud. While the option is active, all the installations recorded by those tracker are sent to FraudScore.

   Restrictions

   The anti-fraud option is not availabe in trackers with media sources Google Ads, Google Search, and Yandex.Direct.

Assessment scores are available in 24 hours after the first install is sent for assessment. You can view them in the Sources → Fraud assessment grouping in the User Acquisition report.

We recommend using as many parameters provided by the ad network as possible, including:

• Platform ID
• Keywords
• Group ID
• Ad ID

This information helps analyze fraud in greater detail and address fraudulent activity in a more targeted manner (for example, only disable individual platforms when needed).

How the fraud risk is assessed

FraudScore analyzes traffic using more than 150 metrics that are divided into 33 groups called Extended Fraud Reasons. In each group, several metrics are analyzed using different algorithms.

There's also a higher-level division into fraud reasons, but the system primarily uses extended fraud reasons for analysis.

For each extended fraud reason identified, the conversion gets a fraud score. If multiple anomalies are detected for the same conversion, its fraud scores for these anomalies are summed up. Depending on its total fraud score, the conversion is assigned a fraud level:

• Not fraud: Non-suspicious traffic.
• Likely not fraud: Low fraud risk level (1–2 violations), the fraud score is no more than 33.
• Likely fraud: Medium fraud risk level (2–4 violations), the fraud score is between 33 and 66.
• Fraud: High fraud risk level (4 or more non-critical violations, 3 or more critical violations), the fraud score is over 66.

AppMetrica reports only include resources classified as fraud and likely fraud.

For more information on using fraud assessments, see How to use "Extended Fraud Reasons" slice.

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