‘ViperBot’, a global advertising fraud scheme attempting to steal over £6m ($8m) in ad spend across connected television and mobile video, has been uncovered.
DoubleVerify’s Fraud Lab announced today it identified the new scheme, declaring it one of the most sophisticated it has yet found, and one that continues to spoof more than 5 million devices and up to 85 million ad requests per day.
The scheme works by stripping and redirecting verification tags, allowing fraudsters to evade detection and spoof premium video inventory on both CTV and mobile apps.
It was unclear precisely how DoubleVerify managed to detect the fraud despite the sophistication of the scheme – a company representative did not respond by the time of publication when asked for further clarification.
The ViperBot scheme is still active, though peak activity occurred during the holiday season.
A Juniper Research study released in February expects advertising spend lost to fraud to reach $68bn globally in 2022, with 35% of losses occurring in the US and 25% of losses occurring in Japan, China, South Korea, and the UK combined.
Juniper’s report urges digital advertisers to form strategic partnerships with ad fraud detection and prevention vendors, like DoubleVerify.
DoubleVerify states that advertisers working with them are protected from server-side ad insertion and verification stripping schemes like ViperBot.
However, ad fraud expert Dr Augustine Fou warned that the $8m per month figure cited by DoubleVerify is “insignificant” in the greater scheme of ad fraud and digital adspend.
Fou also told The Media Leader: “When DoubleVerify reports 1% [invalid traffic] most people assume the other 99% is fine. The way they should think about it is that DV failed to detect anything in the other 99% including the undisclosed portion where they have no data because their detection tag was blocked or stripped out.”
