What is audio fraud?

Audio fraud targets the digital audio advertising ecosystem by artificially inflating audio impressions or traffic to increase ad costs fraudulently. Fraudsters use bots or low-quality traffic sources to mimic real listeners, tricking advertisers into paying for non-existent or low-value audiences. The most common application of audio fraud is within the digital advertising world, where fraudsters inflate audio traffic to boost ad placement costs.

Audio advertising is projected to continue to increase over the coming years, growing at a solid 6.8% rate in 2024 to reach $7.12 billion, and accounting for 40.4% of audio revenues.

Audio ads can appear anywhere, which makes the environment much more complex to protect. People listen to audio-based content at home, in their cars, on airplanes, or in grocery stores. Unlike environments like mobile apps and CTV, “audio” is not specific to a device type or application.

Audio fraud is also more challenging to detect because audio-based ads appear in low-signal environments, such as podcasts, or through server-side ad insertion (SSAI), which makes traditional detection methods less effective.

Audio fraud inflates impressions, wastes ad spend and misleads performance data. It also contributes to other problems:

• Causes companies to pay for ads that don’t reach real users
• Inflates ad costs without genuine user engagement
• Erodes trust with clients and consumers
• Undermines trust in programmatic audio ads
• Skews performance data, hindering optimization
• Leads to higher costs to detect and prevent fraud

Malicious actors committing fraud in other environments are expanding into audio fraud to capitalize on the nascent verification and standards and relatively high CPMs. It is crucial to utilize advanced detection technologies like HUMAN to tackle this issue.

HUMAN’s expertise in detecting connected TV (CTV) ad fraud provides the foundation for audio fraud prevention, as these forms of fraud share similar threat vectors. Server-side ad insertion (SSAI) spoofing is a key threat model in audio and video streaming impressions. So HUMAN leverages our knowledge and experience from CTV to provide effective audio fraud protection.

Today, HUMAN observes more than 20 trillion digital interactions per week, giving our platform unprecedented visibility across the ecosystem. With this, we can better understand what fraud looks like across all environments.

At HUMAN, we leverage expertise in CTV SSAI to identify and detect fraud in low-signal audio SSAI environments.

Our Satori Threat Intelligence and Research team continuously monitors ongoing threats to the ecosystem, including app spoofing and false claims that traffic is “audio” to capture advertising funds.

By partnering with the IAB Tech Lab and TAG, HUMAN works to define industry standards and advocate for adoption to protect the ever-evolving ecosystem.

• Ad fraud in audio: The promise and challenges of audio advertising
• Audio advertising fraud: What you need to know
• Programmatic audio roundtable
• Fight fraud in audio