Click Fraud Detection in Online and Mobile Advertising for Real Time Bidding Environment

The speed at which internet growth changed the advertising field enabled businesses worldwide to develop online advertising as their main marketing tactic. Businesses use different digital advertising models, such as display ads and SEO, together with email marketing and mobile advertising, to connect with larger audiences across various platforms. The advertising sector has experienced sharp expansion in mobile advertising, which enables application developers to generate revenue by showing native ads within their app interfaces. Mobile ad fraud presents a major existential threat to the entire online advertising network. Click fraud is a common type of attack that happens in cost-per-click (CPC) advertising. In the mobile advertising sector, attackers create fake clicks to fool the system and make money falsely. Mobile ad fraud includes all illicit activities targeting marketing technology that mislead publishers, advertisers, and vendors, resulting in monetary damage within the mobile advertising sector. The Real-Time Bidding (RTB) system uses a large part of mobile advertising budgets for instant auctions that link advertisers straight to their target customers. RTB is vulnerable to fraudulent activity, which complicates the problems currently associated with click fraud. A thorough analysis of click fraud in online advertising is provided in this paper, with an emphasis on mobile ad fraud in RTB scenarios. In order to create a more transparent and safe digital advertising ecosystem, we examine the different kinds, methods, and financial effects of fraudulent activity. We also go over different fraud detection strategies that are intended to recognize and avoid fraudulent clicks.