A report sheds light on the highly confidential Google program for combating online advertising fraud (Online advertising fraud).
Being the undisputed leader in the advertising sector – with more than 300 billion ad impressions every month – Google is trying to do everything possible to stop the actions of the cunning ones who steal billions of dollars from the advertised brands, through various scams of the “ad fraud” type.
Google, which uses DoubleClick technology allowing advertisers to fully leverage their online campaigns, avoided until recently revealing the methods it uses to detect and counter malicious ad-bots, which are used, among other things, for fraud aimed at artificially inflating ad revenue.
However, in an exclusive interview it gave to AdAge a few days ago, Google revealed for the first time information about its project to combat online fraud, which aims to financially drain the advertising industry.
Given that this particular type of fraud is in reality a form of organized crime, the project runs under extreme secrecy, while the names of the individuals working on it remain confidential.
Google's secret unit consists of about 100 people, who work nonstop to eliminate online advertising fraud, an activity estimated to cost more than ten billion dollars (€ 8.970.000.000) each year, for the advertised brands.
Google's anti-fraud team is led by Douglas de Jager, founder of Spider.io, a company that was acquired in early last year by Google and aims to verify the accuracy of the statistics provided for ads, using special detection and prevention technology for online fraud.
An ally of the team in its effort to identify those who exploit its advertising system for illegal purposes is “Powerdrill”, a hypercomputer of relentless speed, which is capable of detecting unusual activity and recognizing traffic that is not caused by a human factor, but by bots.
