mFilterIt Ad Fraud Report: AI-Driven Fraud Puts 12% of Marketing Spend at Risk

• Even premium and brand-safe environments remain vulnerable to AI-driven fraud, reducing campaign efficiency and outpacing traditional detection methods.
• Contaminated retargeting pools and gaps in contextual brand safety underline the urgent need for independent oversight and full-funnel intelligence.

mFilterIt, a proudly Made-in-India digital trust and fraud prevention company, has released its latest Ad Fraud Intelligence Report, signalling a critical reset on how ad fraud is viewed in the current scenario. As India accelerates into a fully digital economy, the report warns that fraud has evolved faster than governance frameworks, with AI now capable of imitating real user behaviour and bypassing rule-based verification. Marketers continue to rely on outdated metrics like viewability, clicks, CTR, and installs, leading to distorted optimisation and almost 12% leakage of marketing spend into invalid or fraudulent traffic. The report reinforces that this is no longer a technical glitch, but a direct P&L risk, and protecting digital integrity is essential for sustainable growth.

The report challenges long-standing assumptions around media quality and brand safety measures. It also challenges a consistent norm of seeing ad fraud as a linear problem, breaking down how it permeates across the funnel in a non-linear way. It finds that viewable impressions often attract ads are seen by bots, not humans; fraud persists even in premium and closed environments and performance metrics are distorted by upstream exposure. Brand safety systems miss contextual and vernacular cues, while retargeting pools show contamination at the source, misdirecting optimisation. These insights point to a broader shift where fraud operates as a connected system rather than isolated events.

The report outlines clear implications for marketers, agencies and platforms. Branding and performance must be viewed as part of a single risk surface, making reliance on platform reported metrics insufficient. Attention becomes a more reliable measure of media quality than viewability alone. Attribution models, especially in app and affiliate ecosystems, must distinguish authenticity from performance. Contextual intelligence is required in place of keyword-based safety models, and the report calls for a governance approach rooted in trust instead of delivery metrics.

As the report shows fraud operating as a connected system, it also outlines the shifts needed to manage it. It calls for full-funnel validation instead of point-in-time checks and urges the use of multi-signal intelligence in place of single metric scoring. The report highlights the need for independent oversight to address gaps in platform reported data and recommends context-led decision making rather than keyword-based filtering to improve media quality.

Amit Relan, CEO and Co-founder, mFilterIt, said, “The real risk in digital advertising is not fraud itself, but the illusion of clean data. Marketers must treat trust as a performance metric alongside efficiency. The report identifies the shifts needed for brands to operate confidently in an AI accelerated ecosystem, where traditional measures no longer reflect true engagement. It highlights how adopting robust validation, multi-signal intelligence and context-led decision making can safeguard both performance and brand reputation.”

Dhiraj Gupta, CTO and Co-founder, mFilterIt, said, “Fraud today mirrors human behaviour at scale, making traditional rule-based systems obsolete. The future of digital advertising lies in behavioural, contextual and full-funnel intelligence. mFilterIt’s role is to illuminate the risks the industry has long normalised, helping marketers and platforms move beyond outdated assumptions and adopt strategies that ensure both authenticity and performance across the ecosystem.”

The report reinforces mFilterIt’s role as a custodian of digital trust, moving beyond traditional traffic validation. It introduces a paradigm linking media trust, brand trust and financial trust. This shows how risks at any layer can cascade across the business. The findings reframe ad fraud as a strategic business risk rather than just a media issue. They highlight AI’s accelerating impact on fraud and position fraud intelligence as a leadership function. The report calls for a new era of accountability, transparency and independent oversight in digital media.

About mFilterIt

mFilterIt is a new-age, driven-tech company on a mission to create a safe, transparent, and secure digital ecosystem. Founded in 2015, mFilterIt began by validating ad traffic to empower advertisers with clean data, curb ad spends wastage, and build trust in digital advertising. Over the years with the evolving digital ecosystem and rising threats, this mission expanded beyond media validation to include brand protection and financial protection, enabling businesses to operate safely and with transparency across every digital touchpoint.

Evolving from media trust to safeguarding brand and financial trust, mFilterIt now safeguards the entire digital ecosystem – helping advertisers reach real audiences with intelligence that matters, protecting brands from impersonation and misinformation, and partnering with banks and financial institutions to detect mule accounts, eliminate fraudulent leads, and secure digital transactions.

Facebook to introduce missed call ads in India

Facebook, the internet social networking site has chalked out yet another interesting strategy to bring its advertisers closer to its users. After target and personalized advertising, Facebook has now come up with the concept of “missed calls” advertisements.

This new type of ads lets the mobile phone users to click a button on the ad that calls the brand advertiser, who immediately disconnects the call and then calls the user back. In this process, the user isn’t charged much since the advertiser disconnects the call immediately.

The return call from the advertiser is basically a pre-recorded audio message which will have information about everything ranging from shopping discounts, cricket updates and celebrity news etc. All this minimizes the data usage charges for the user. This missed call ad service is being powered by a startup called Zipdial.

If rumors are to be believed, this missed call advertising was specially designed by Facebook keeping the Indian Market in mind. India has only 150 million Smartphone users out of its 1.2 billion people which mean that the rest of the people are either using feature phones or have no phones at all. The feature phones lack touch screen capability which means its user can’t interact much with the content on the screen of the phone.

These advertisements can be seen as the social networking site’s efforts to push its business in countries like India, Indonesia and Brazil, which in return would help the company in boosting its overall revenue.

Approximately 84% of the site’s 1.28 billion monthly users are stationed outside the US and Canada, but surprisingly the average revenue per user that the company makes in international markets is very less than what it does in the US and Canada.

The company has done several of these experiments in the past few years. It has used the target and personalized ads features which shows the user only the type of advertisements that they are likely to purchase or would be interested in, to super cookies which allowed the social networking site to track your online activities even after you have signed out.

According to Facebook, in its early tests of the missed call advertisements by Garnier Men, these ads resulted in a 2.5 times year on year increase in online sales. Facebook will make the missed call ads more widely available in the coming months.

Facebook to introduce missed call ads in India

Facebook, the internet social networking site has chalked out yet another interesting strategy to bring its advertisers closer to its users. After target and personalized advertising, Facebook has now come up with the concept of “missed calls” advertisements.

This new type of ads lets the mobile phone users to click a button on the ad that calls the brand advertiser, who immediately disconnects the call and then calls the user back. In this process, the user isn’t charged much since the advertiser disconnects the call immediately.

The return call from the advertiser is basically a pre-recorded audio message which will have information about everything ranging from shopping discounts, cricket updates and celebrity news etc. All this minimizes the data usage charges for the user. This missed call ad service is being powered by a startup called Zipdial.

If rumors are to be believed, this missed call advertising was specially designed by Facebook keeping the Indian Market in mind. India has only 150 million Smartphone users out of its 1.2 billion people which mean that the rest of the people are either using feature phones or have no phones at all. The feature phones lack touch screen capability which means its user can’t interact much with the content on the screen of the phone.

These advertisements can be seen as the social networking site’s efforts to push its business in countries like India, Indonesia and Brazil, which in return would help the company in boosting its overall revenue.

Approximately 84% of the site’s 1.28 billion monthly users are stationed outside the US and Canada, but surprisingly the average revenue per user that the company makes in international markets is very less than what it does in the US and Canada.

The company has done several of these experiments in the past few years. It has used the target and personalized ads features which shows the user only the type of advertisements that they are likely to purchase or would be interested in, to super cookies which allowed the social networking site to track your online activities even after you have signed out.

According to Facebook, in its early tests of the missed call advertisements by Garnier Men, these ads resulted in a 2.5 times year on year increase in online sales. Facebook will make the missed call ads more widely available in the coming months.