Pre-pandemic Click-Farm consolidation
By the end of the decade, the global damage caused by ad fraud reached an alarming $35 Billion. 2019 saw the consolidation of large Asian click-farms and networks of compromised mobile devices, marking a definitive shift from desktop to smartphones.
Estimated global damage (2019)
Source: Juniper Research 2019
The Mobile Advertising Explosion
With 70% of global traffic now on smartphones, criminals abandoned complex datacenters to infect users' phones directly.
The perfect vehicle turned out to be 'hidden malware' inside free applications published on official stores (App Store and Google Play).
Mobile Fraud Tactics
- Malicious Apps (Flashlights and Calculators): Seemingly harmless apps that requested excessive permissions and clicked on thousands of banners in the background.
- Physical Click-Farms: Secret warehouses containing thousands of real phones managed by automated macros to simulate app engagement.
- Device ID Reset: A single phone resetting its ID a thousand times a day to look like a thousand different users.
The Vulnerability of Local SMEs
While large multinationals began adopting advanced monitoring tools, small businesses were left defenseless, paying for geo-localized campaigns clicked by farms across the globe.
This scenario laid the groundwork for the impending disaster of 2020, when the entire world would rush online.