Ask HN: Falsely accused of ad fraud; what do do?

2 pointsby mertens10 lat temu1 comments

Over the past weeks I've been changing my advertising setup. Now I've already been informed by a couple of potential partners that they don't want to work with me because a third party has (falsely) labelled our website as being involved in Ad Fraud.

I'm sure that there's no ad fraud on the website, since I'm the only person benefitting from ads on the website. I've had the website for years and have always just ran AdX so it can't really be a historic problem either. I don't see anything suspicious in logs or in Google Analytics either.

What I'm thinking that might cause this is the following. The website is a browser games website, so people spend a lot of their time playing a game (as opposed to reading / scrolling / interacting directly with the page). The games are either an swf object or in an iframe. I think that this means that the main page doesn't see any activity / interactions (in terms of DOM events) from the user, which might cause these automatic fraud detection systems to fire.

Is that possible?

Does anyone have another possible explanation?

Is there anything I can do?

One of the companies in question is DoubleVerify, the other is AppNexus. Does anyone know someone at one of those companies who could take a look?

1 comments

acfou10 lat temu

Hi, I have helped many publishers that have been falsely accused of ad fraud due to bad measurements by the fraud detection companies. But also check to make sure your wordpress installation hasn't been compromised behind the scenes with malware that might actually be generating fake ad impressions. If you need further help, please reach out to me Augustine Fou (firstname . last name [at] gmail )