The rise of digital fraud

Lily Biros

lb526018@ohio.edu

While there have been good things that have come with the internet such as citizen journalism, high-speed connection and worldwide connectivity, the advertising and marketing industry has severely suffered due to digital fraud and accountability. Due to this phenomenon, this has saturated advertising because it's hard to figure out what is true or false. It's also hard to figure out if a post is really popular, or if the views are just online bots. This influx of false information, bot traffic, ad insertion, hacking, and cyber security has negatively damaged companies who are truthfully creating their advertisements.

Source: IBM

According to Tom Phillips, CEO of Dstillery, "we're out there trying to do it the right way and by comparison we're facing a prisoners' dilemma against competitors who show great results from fraudulent traffic. Anyone along the chain who is playing it straight gets screwed." From the public's point of view, companies who use bot traffic make it look like their companies are doing better than it seems which makes the public want to use their product or service. 

Due to these statistics, there isn't much incentive for companies to organically create content. Companies who don't look bad, and companies who do look great to the public. There aren't many consequences for companies who use fraudulent advertising because there's just so much of it. Companies hire personal hackers, and although fraud detection firms are good, they aren't overarching. 

Fraudulent advertising also negatively affects marketers because most of the online traffic that companies receive is false. According to the Ad Age, "clearly if people are saying that 30% of the impressions out there are fraudulent, there needs to be a lot more companies taking these steps." A little less than half of a company's online traffic is fake which means that there needs to be more done against online fraud. Falsely inflating digital impressions means that people are getting more money for the numbers, and marketers are buying those number to target their audience. But if all those numbers are fake, then the marketers suffer, and no one really knows what is truly popular which decreases the value of impressions. 

Digital fraud is harming the future of advertising and marketing due to the fact that there are more benefits to commit fraud than there is to not. No one is benefiting from telling the truth which only increases the number of bots and hacking. The only way for this to decrease is for fraud-detection firms to get smarter, for companies to become more ethical and for the internet to become more transparent.