Singapore – Tech giant Google has recently announced new policy updates in order to combat financial fraud in advertising. First launched in the United Kingdom in 2021, the policy will roll out in phases in Australia, Singapore and Taiwan.

According to an online statement from Alejandro Borgia, director for ads privacy and safety at Google, the new policy creates a new layer of security against fraudsters and will help further safeguard their network from financial scams.

As it rolls out in the three aforementioned markets, advertisers will be able to apply for verification at the end of June, and the policy will go into effect on August 30, 2022. As part of the verification process, financial services advertisers in these markets will need to demonstrate that they are authorised by their relevant financial services regulator, and have completed Google’s advertiser verification program in order to begin promoting their products and services.

“We work tirelessly to make sure the ads we serve are safe and trustworthy, and we know that partnering and collaborating with government regulators is critical to our success. That’s why we’re closely coordinating with regulators in these three markets to make sure this program is effective at scale. In the coming months, we plan to further expand these verification requirements to advertisers in additional countries and regions,” Borgia said.

This is the latest policy from Google to tackle online fraud in advertising. In 2020, they launched their advertiser verification program that will require Google advertisers to verify and disclose information about their businesses, such as where they operate and what they’re selling or promoting.

“This policy is just the latest step in our longstanding effort to tackle online fraud. We have robust policies in place to prohibit bad actors from deceiving people through tactics such as phishing, using clickbait, or providing misleading information about a product, service or business. We also have strict rules about how advertisers can market financial products such as loans and debt services,” Borgia added.

Hong Kong – As the rise of scam messages from fraudulent entities begin to overwhelm consumers, users in the Asia-Pacific region now have their trust with brands slowly erode once brands get entangled in any form of scam messages, the latest survey from digital trust company Callsign shows.

According to their latest insights, around 52% of APAC users lose trust with the brands they are loyal to once a scam message sent to them claims to be associated with their favorite brand, regardless of any real association to the message itself or its actual content.

Such loss of brand confidence also unveils a reason that 28% of APAC users state that they receive more scam messages than personal messages from friends and family. On a global scale, the insights puts out the ratio of people receiving scam messages at around 4 out of 5 people.

As 51% of APAC respondents admit that they have fallen victim at some point in their lives to these SMS fraud or scam messages, 29% of the respondents say that they have stopped using the brand mentioned or allegedly associated with the fraud message.

“The problem has become so pervasive that consumers mistrust the technology, processes designed to protect them from fraudsters and confirm identities with many adamant that users must prove beyond doubt who they are when logging in to use a platform, and that there should be an online identity system to quell the surge of scams,” Callsign said in a press statement.

With these issues in mind, 45% of APAC respondents say they think identity is the problem and that people should prove who they are when signing into any platform, which includes authentication measures like two-factor authentication (2FA) and third-party app authenticators.

For Stuart Dobbie, senior vice president for innovation at Callsign, the insights shows that consumer trust in our digital world has vanished and, rightly or wrongly brands, are being blamed. He added despite all these sentiments,little is being actually done to purposely re-establish digital trust through complete and accurate digital identities.

He further explained that with consumers feeling the brunt of perceived inaction by organizations, it is no surprise that they are asking for more protection, and that if we continue to be unable to know and trust that the person is who they say they are online, large parts of society will stop working.

“Digital trust is about the confidence we have in the technology, processes, and people to secure our digital world. Digital trust is underpinned by digital identities, and the fact that scams are running wild proves that our digital identities are well and truly broken. It’s time to re-think fraud prevention strategies, identifying genuine users through their behaviors will allow us to identify users online and re-establish digital trust,” Dobbie added.

Meanwhile, Namrata Jolly, general manager for Asia-Pacific at Callsign, commented, “The solution lies in re-thinking how we fight fraud and how we identify people online. Current approaches tackle both challenges by only identifying fraud. The problem with this approach is that a fraudster using stolen credentials looks like a genuine user gaining access to accounts or executing transactions. If instead fraud strategies look to positively identify only genuine users, this automatically and simultaneously prevents fraud.”

Manila, Philippines – Top e-wallet in the Philippines GCash’s new service is a step forward in customer service and in fulfilling its brand promise of safe financial transactions. In partnership with Singapore-headquartered regional insurtech Igloo, GCash launches a first-of-its-kind online shopping insurance protection that will secure consumers from online marketplace fraud.

Igloo’s Online Shopping product is part of its Cyber Protection vertical, which secures financial loss arising directly from any online marketplace fraud. Through the partnership, GCash users will be protected from any transaction they make via online marketplaces such as Lazada, Shopee, including Viber, and Facebook marketplaces as long as their payment was fulfilled through the GCash platform. 

GCash continues to be the leading digital wallet in the Philippines and is continually amplifying its services. The fintech has also recently announced that it is eyeing to launch a Buy Now Pay Later service within this year. 

Martha Sazon, GCash’s president and CEO, said that the shopping insurance offering comes at a time when they have seen robust growth in online transactions and user base.

“With excellent customer experience being the heart of our business alongside value-added services through our platform, we are thrilled to launch this new product with Igloo that secures online transactions for our customers,” said Sazon.

Mario Berta, Igloo’s country manager for the Philippines, commented, “We are excited to partner with the leading e-wallet in the country, GCash, who shares the same vision of protecting digital consumers by pioneering innovative solutions to end-customers at an economical price. With the growing number of digital consumers in the country, now more than ever, is it most important to provide flexible solutions for the changing needs and processes of both businesses and customers.” 

According to GCash, its users currently stand at 46 million. The app has also had over 13 million log-ins per day, peaking at almost 15 million in the second quarter of 2021.

GCash has been integrating insurance as one of its value propositions to users. Within the app, it currently offers a line of insurance products similarly powered by Singapore-grown insurance firm, Singlife. GCash’s offerings are mainly characterized by low-cost premiums and include a range of protection from income loss to health coverage such as Dengue and even COVID-19.

The Online Shopping protection is one of the first products Igloo will be launching with GCash but will soon be rolling out more products with the e-wallet in the next six months that will be geared towards MSMEs.

California, USA – Programmatic digital advertising company PubMatic has announced that it is now expanding its fraud-free program to omnichannel clients, specifically those handling inventories of connected TV (CTV) and over-the-top media service (OTT).

The program is designed to expand scale and engagement opportunities for buyers and promote the development of the rapidly growing CTV sector, from a limited number of top-tier channels and apps, to a broader range of channels and apps with unique high value audiences.

Furthermore, it is expanded to include a money-back guarantee for demand-side partners if fraud is verified on PubMatic’s platform.

“We see tremendous upside potential in the transition from linear TV to connected TV, but fraud concerns have prevented some buyers from fully benefiting. We are confident in the quality of inventory on the PubMatic platform, and our fraud-free program should give buyers confidence to bid on quality CTV inventory at scale,” said Paulina Klimenko, chief growth officer at PubMatic.

She further says that publishers are creating a wealth of new premium TV content and that they are attempting to remove the major challenges and risks. 

“PubMatic is helping DSPs, agencies, and advertisers take advantage of the dramatic increase in opportunities to engage the huge numbers of viewers shifting to CTV,” added Klimenko

With many buyers continuously buying from a small number of CTV publishers due to concerns over quality and fraud, PubMatic’s fraud-free program aims to enable buyers to embrace the full potential of programmatic bidding, where efficiency and control do not need to be traded off against each other.

In addition, PubMatic believes the full potential of programmatic CTV can only be realized when buyers have confidence that their investments will reach real consumers within their intended contextual environments.

“PubMatic employs a rigorous inventory review process for publishers across all platforms and formats (mobile, desktop, digital video and CTV). Leveraging a combination of expert human analysis, proprietary and third-party fraud detection tools, PubMatic vets publishers prior to onboarding and implements pre-bid and post-bid protections to detect and filter out invalid traffic and other nefarious activity, and has historically achieved low fraud levels,” the company said in a press statement.

Singapore – HUMAN, a cybersecurity company and formerly White Ops, has launched a new program that aims to defraud connected television (CTV) systems, in partnership with the newly-launched initiative ‘The Human Collective’ composed of Omnicom Media Group, The Trade Desk, and Magnite, as well as support from Google and Roku.

The launch of the program was in response to the spread of PARETO, a botnet that, according to nearly a million infected mobile Android devices, is pretending to be millions of people watching ads on smart TVs and other devices. The botnet used dozens of mobile apps to impersonate or spoof more than 6,000 CTV apps, accounting for an average of 650 million ad requests every day.

PARETO worked by spoofing signals within malicious Android mobile apps to impersonate consumer TV streaming products running Fire OS, tvOS, Roku OS, and other prominent CTV platforms. The botnet took advantage of digital shifts that were accelerated by the pandemic, hiding in the noise in order to trick advertisers and technology platforms into believing ads were being shown on CTVs. 

HUMAN’s research arm Satori Threat Intelligence and Research Team found the PARETO operation in 2020 and has been working with the HUMAN team to prevent its impacts on clients ever since. The operation is named for The Pareto Principle, an economics concept that dictates that 80% of the impact in any given situation is carried out by only 20% of the actors.

“CTV provides massive opportunities for streaming services and brands to engage with consumers through compelling content and advertising. Because of this opportunity, it is incredibly important for the CTV ecosystem and brands to work together through a collectively protected advertising supply chain to ensure fraud is recognized, addressed, and eliminated as quickly as possible,” said Tamer Hassan, CEO and co-founder at HUMAN.

HUMAN also observed a far smaller but connected effort attempting to spoof consumer streaming platforms. The operation detected a single developer on Roku’s Channel Store with apps connected to PARETO. The apps linked to the developer, impacting less than one half of one percent of Roku’s active devices globally, were designed to communicate with the server that operates the PARETO botnet. The primary operation was associated with 29 Android apps and the secondary operation was associated with one Roku developer delivering the malware to infected devices.

“What’s especially striking about this operation is its scale and sophistication. The actors behind PARETO have a fundamental understanding of numerous aspects of advertising technology, and used that to their advantage in how they hid their work within the CTV ecosystem. Their efforts included low-level network protocol spoofing, which is especially hard to detect, but which our team at HUMAN spotted,” said Michael McNally, chief scientist at HUMAN.

The Satori Threat Intelligence and Research Team used numerous tools to identify the sources of the botnet, whose information has been shared with law enforcement.

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia – Mobile platform developer Forest Interactive has announced a new partnership with French-based cybersecurity firm Evina in detecting and preventing fraudulent traffic, an online threat amplified by the global pandemic.

Said partnership was in response to the significant increase of fraudulent traffic across digital marketing campaigns implemented across Asia and Europe. Prior to the partnership, Forest Interactive had already implemented various digital restrictions such as the prohibition of clickjacking, iFrame, and auto-subscribe, yet non-human traffic was still accumulating.

“While proper restrictions have been rolled out as a guideline for affiliate marketing partners, the rising trend of digitization has intensified fraud attempts and suspicious traffic, which have an impact on the long-term sustainability of our digital campaigns,” said Khedir Yaakub, regional head of marketing & business development at Forest Interactive

He also added, “Our collaboration with Evina is proof of our continued commitment to ensure our services are fraud-free, thus improving our customer experience and end-to-end operations. By implementing this solution into our ecosystem, we would be able to recognize authentic sources and also reduce the fraud rate percentage from a tailored dashboard, allowing us to protect our services from being promoted illegally and to more accurately optimize our campaigns.” 

DCBProtech Dashboard
The dashboard of Evina DCBprotect (Courtesy of Evina)

Meanwhile, David Lotfi, CEO of Evina, said: “Through our collaboration with Forest Interactive, a key industry player in the South Asia set on conquering fraud, we are one step closer to eradicating mobile fraud altogether, in the region and worldwide. By integrating our anti-fraud solution, Forest Interactive will witness first-hand the benefits of a drop in its fraud rate like cleaner traffic, reduced complaint rates, and better business. End-users will be protected from fraud and the mobile platform developer can go on doing what it knows best: providing innovative solutions for mobile operators, fraud-free.” 

The newest cybersecurity partnership will utilize Evina DCBprotect and will be implemented to mobile services with high fraud traffic cases, which includes Thailand, Myanmar, Pakistan, Kuwait, Malaysia, Austria, and the United States of America.

Singapore – The Asia Pacific region is seeing a surge on ad fraud cases this year, as fraudsters are increasingly faking organic metrics, a new report from app marketing platform Adjust shows.

From a general perspective, fraud rates in August this year have increased by 214.86%, compared to statistics recorded last year.

East Asian countries of China and Japan clocked a 65.6% and 60.7% rise respectively, with fake users or online bots emerging as the most prevalent type of fraud in their jurisdictions.

“It is absolutely vital that marketers can trust their data. Without having a clear view, it is simply impossible to make strategic, data-driven decisions. Ultimately, fraud is and will remain to be a challenge we see in the industry, however by implementing the right tools, we will be able to stay one step ahead of the fraudsters and ensure transparency remains a top priority,” says Andreas Naumann, director of fraud prevention at Adjust

A closer look into the Southeast Asian region reveals that 39.11% of the fraud was from software development kit (SDK) spoofing, and 18.95% of them were created by fake bots. By context, SDK spoofing is defined as the creation of legitimate installs of a certain software/app to consume the advertiser’s budget.

“It’s crucial that marketers implement solutions such as Adjust’s free-to-use SDK Signature, which combats this fraud scheme. The reality is that fraud prevention solutions are the only sure way to eliminate fraud, which is why in 2016, Adjust launched the first ad fraud prevention filters in the market and spearheaded the industry-wide movement against fraud,” stated April Tayson, regional vice president for Adjust India and Southeast Asia 

In a statement provided to MARKETECH APAC, Tayson notes that with the approach of the holidays, advertisers need to see the balance of spending ‘big’ on their advertising budget, and the actual data they gathered from customer analytics and attribution.

April Tayson, VP for India & SEA Headshot
April Tayson, Regional Vice President for Adjust India and Southeast Asia

“There are plenty of other best practices well worth incorporating into your Christmas marketing strategy, such as increasing your retargeting spend. By targeting users who have shown interest in your products, retargeting campaigns can be extremely effective when combined with attractive limited-time offers. A discount may be the deciding factor for users who have already clicked on a product page or abandoned their cart,” Tayson stated.

She also added, “Marketers should also be optimizing every step in the conversion funnel to ensure customers have a seamless user experience during the sales period. If a portion of customers are getting stuck in the user funnel, this will prevent you from optimizing your revenue. This is an important step throughout the entire year, but increased revenue opportunities during the holiday season make it a critical step at this time of year.”

Furthermore, Tayson stated that for companies strategizing their plans for 2021, brands would need to focus on both sides of their advertising strategy: saving advertising budget from fraud attacks and prevention of future frauds, not just detection.

Organic VS Paid Reject Installs
An infographic showing the comparison of rejected install statistics between organic and paid advertising campaigns (Courtesy of Adjust)

“Using fraud prevention filters is the only way to stop fraud in its tracks, helping you save your UA budget and keeping your data sets clean and reliable. From there, you’ll be able to acquire better and more valuable users while identifying your best-performing channels. It’s also important your fraud prevention filters are based on prevention and not just detection. Proactive fraud detection means this fraudulent traffic is cut off at the source, and you avoid having to trawl through your data to find the fraudulent installs and deal with chargebacks,” Tayson concluded.