Click fraud has re-emerged as a significant challenge for digital advertising, fueled by the shift to mobile-first, performance-driven buying models. What was once seen as a solved problem has evolved into a more complex threat, one that impacts advertisers, publishers, and platforms alike.
To help the industry better understand these changes, HUMAN recently published a new whitepaper: Click Fraud in Digital Advertising: An Industry Guide to Protection and Prevention. It explores how click fraud tactics have evolved, where vulnerabilities exist, and the strategies needed to protect advertiser investments.
Below are some of the highlights from that white paper.
Evolving Tactics and Exploited Vulnerabilities
As click fraud tactics become more advanced, different actors play a role in shaping the threat landscape. Some groups build bots, others provide the infrastructure behind them, and still others profit indirectly when click volumes rise
- Fraud Operators & Botnetworks: Professional operators deploy bots, scripts, and automation at scale, sometimes powered by compromised devices. A prime example is our BADBOX 2.0 investigation, where more than one million connected devices were shipped with pre-installed malware. Once activated, these devices quietly generated fraudulent clicks in the background, simulating user engagement without the owner’s knowledge.
- Click farms and Human-Driven Fraud: Unlike bot networks, click farms rely on low-cost human labor to execute fraudulent activity, this relies on low cost human labor. These large groups of real humans are hired to click on ads, install apps, or engage with content in ways that appear organic.
- Competitive Abuse and Strategic Sabotage: Click fraud can also be weaponized. In auction-based PPC environments, rivals may intentionally drive invalid clicks on each other’s ads to drain budgets, distort optimization, or reduce reach.
At the heart of click fraud is the expectation—and assumption—that a click logically equates to a landing page visit. However, a technical understanding of the click life cycle shows that a click represents an action: the user (or bot) activating the ad. A page view, on the other hand, represents a successful landing page load.
But not every click results in a page view. That drop-off can happen due to network latency, accidental taps, incorrect tagging, redirect chains timing out, or malicious interference. Fraudsters have found new ways to exploit the time and space between the click and the landing page to simulate engagement, effectively fooling various ad performance measurement systems.
Ecosystem-Wide Impact
Click fraud is not isolated solely to advertisers; it reverberates across the entire internet supply chain. While advertisers certainly face skewed metrics and wasted ad spend, publishers and ad tech platforms suffer their own consequences. Publishers rely heavily on advertising revenue to sustain their businesses, but must also maintain traffic quality to avoid clawbacks. Advertising platforms depend on trust to maintain their place in the ecosystem. The buy side expects these platforms to deliver scale and performance, plus safeguards that ensure quality of performance.
HUMAN integration with LinkedIn Ads: A Real-World Example
To explore effective defenses against these challenges, LinkedIn integrated HUMAN’s Ad Click Defense across display inventory on the LinkedIn Audience Network in April 2025.
In just four months, the integration delivered measurable results:
- 10% improvement in overall invalid traffic detection
- 500M+ clicks analyzed across display, desktop, mobile, CTV, and in-app
These results illustrate the power of layered, click-specific protections: defenses designed to validate engagement at the moment it happens, rather than relying solely on impression-level safeguards or post-click analytics.
The Path Forward
Protecting against click fraud requires a coordinated, ecosystem-wide approach. As fraud tactics evolve, stakeholders need to work together to:
- Develop shared standards for click validation and reporting
- Invest in more transparent measurement frameworks to rebuild trust
- Share threat intelligence across the ecosystem to identify emerging attack patterns faster
- Combine technical defenses with collaboration to close detection gaps
These industry-wide efforts are critical to preserving data integrity, protecting advertiser budgets, and maintaining confidence in digital advertising’s performance metrics.
To help all stakeholders better understand the issue and how to address it, the whitepaper serves as a comprehensive resource for deeper insights, technical details, and actionable best practices. We even share a real-world case study that demonstrates the importance of dedication to traffic quality, platform integrity, and advertiser trust.
Your Industry Guide to Click Fraud in 2025
Understand evolving fraud tactics, see where vulnerabilities exist, and learn how to protect ad spend across the ecosystem.