Fraud Exposed Series: Unmasking Device Spoofing and Its Impact on Advertisers!

Device spoofing is the act of tricking advertisers by presenting a device as a different device. Let’s understand this with a simple example.

If you are running an ad for app downloads, you are only interested in traffic coming from mobile devices. With device spoofing, fraudsters can present a server in their data center as a mobile device visiting the publisher’s website and clicking on your ad.

Fraudsters employ a variety of technical processes to achieve this. One such method is known as User Agent (UA) spoofing. The User-Agent string of every device carries many data points that are used to identify the device. These include the device make and model, processor information, location information (based on IP address), and information about the operating system running on the device. UA spoofing allows fraudsters to falsify this information.Read more