mFilterIt has released a new Ad Fraud Intelligence Report, and the findings show how serious digital ad fraud has become in India. The company says advertisers are losing almost 12% of their marketing budget to invalid or fraudulent traffic. This is happening even when brands place ads on premium and “safe” platforms.
The report also says AI has changed how fraud works. Bots now behave like real users. They watch videos, scroll, click, and even mimic patterns that look human. Because of this, older checks like viewability, CTR, clicks, installs, or basic fraud rules are no longer enough.
mFilterIt explains that fraud is no longer a simple, linear problem. It affects every stage of a campaign. For example:
- Ads marked as “viewable” may still be seen by bots.
- Retargeting pools are getting contaminated because fake users enter the audience.
- Premium platforms are also failing to stop sophisticated bots.
- Brand-safety tools miss contextual and regional cues, which allows unsafe content to slip through.
The report also links media trust, brand trust, and financial trust, reminding companies that problems in ad quality can quickly spill over into reputation and revenue.
Some earlier industry reports also support these concerns. For example, DoubleVerify found that while ad fraud in India dropped by 36% due to better adoption of verification tools, fraudsters are quickly upgrading their methods again.
Advertising in India is becoming more digital every year. Digital ads now make up almost 46% of India’s total ad market, according to industry estimates. As more money moves online, fraud becomes a bigger financial risk. A 12% leak may not look big at first, but at the national scale, it translates to thousands of crores wasted every year.
Global reports also show how serious this is. Worldwide ad fraud losses could touch US $172 billion by 2028. India is not far behind in terms of rising risk.
The report says advertisers are still trusting metrics such as Viewability, Clicks, CTR, and Installs that do not reflect real engagement. These numbers can be manipulated easily by AI-driven bots. This leads brands to wrong conclusions, wrong optimisations, and wrong audiences. If the data is polluted at the start, every decision after that becomes unreliable.
The company says the bigger danger is not fraud itself, but the false sense of clean data that misleads brands into thinking everything is fine.
mFilterIt suggests that marketers must now move beyond basic checks and rethink how they evaluate campaigns. The key suggestions include:
- Full-funnel validation instead of checking only one metric or one stage.
- Multi-signal intelligence that studies behavior, context, and patterns together.
- Independent audits instead of relying only on platform-reported numbers.
- Context-led brand safety, especially for India’s large multilingual internet ecosystem.
India’s digital economy is growing fast. But if the industry does not upgrade how it measures quality, ad budgets will continue to leak. The bigger danger is that fake engagement will mislead teams into thinking their campaigns are doing well. That can impact performance, brand reputation, and even business decisions. To keep up with AI-powered fraud, the industry will need stronger oversight, better tools, and more transparency across platforms.
