Marketing attribution firm Incrmntal has claimed that a fraudulent ad network is operating in the mobile games space.
It is not naming the company in question currently, but an incendiary blog posted on the company’s site, written by Incrmntal CEO and cofounder Maor Sadra, alleges that the ad network has been “running fraudulent inventory, stealing credit from other ad platforms, and from organics, by defrauding both their community and advertisers.”
The company in question has “several names, all affiliated with the same company,” says Sadra. “Advertisers believe that they are getting traffic from a rewarded app, whose audience is in premium countries, but what they are actually getting is a bunch of VPN users simulating their country, attribution fraud, and $0 revenue gains,” the blog continues.
Incrmntal and Sadra are not naming the ad platform in question until it is “sued by some of the advertisers it harmed”, but more details may emerge once the “lawsuits are filed and go into the public domain”, the blog says. The alleged fraudster has “several ‘lookalike’ companies”, and has built its business by buying up cheap apps then pitching advertisers based on that audience, the blog says.
Sadra says that Incrmntal customers found that scaling ad spend with the alleged fraudster “showed a clear pattern of cannibalization”, and pausing spend on the platform “caused no loss of conversions, and a gain of conversion for other channels (and organics)”.
“No matter what change was measured across these companies’ ‘assets’ – no value was ever seen as being gained or lost,” Sadra’s blog continues. “All conversions measured were cannibalizing the conversions generated by other ad platforms (or organics), and the revenue impact from this platform was nonexistent.”
Incrmntal said it used its marketing platform to run over 1,000 individual activity measurements across all 11 countries the ad platform claims to operate in, across over 20 advertisers.
“All analysis presented the same exact value: no value,” added Sadra.
