FaDe bot being used to bring sophisticated invalid traffic for advertisers

A bot coded at ‘FaDe’ has been discovered by mFilerIt, which is being used to get sophisticated invalid traffic (SIVT), in this case, users for many apps. There are at least 6 large advertisers impacted as indicated by early results, says the company.

The key observation of this bot includes a sudden jump in the organic traffic of the advertisers. It seems to have been coded incorrectly resulting in many (roughly 40%) installs being tracked as organic (instead of inorganic, which would generate revenue for the publisher). This 40% resulted in organic traffic spiking for different advertisers, but with resulting transaction or install ratio’s taking a dip (since this bot was able to drive installs but not able to reach up to subscriptions).

The new users are signing up on the app version which was launched in January by one of the advertisers. They had a couple of refreshes since then and the latest version was upgraded in April. However, the new signups of May from this bot were still happening on the January app version. Registrations, as well as installs, were being faked.

The signups from specific smartphone models are for very old OS versions. These are at least 3-4 generations old than what the brands are shipping their devices with. In each case, the bot used these to exploit the lower security available on these Android releases to run itself.

Dhiraj Gupta, CTO, and co-founder, mFilterIt explaining the discovery added, “Some rogue publishers are deploying BOTs to get fake installs by trying to simulate a real user’s profile. However, it is next to impossible to mirror a real user where several parameters keep on changing dynamically.”

As per quick estimates, the bots would have already wasted around Rs 10 million each within a 15 day period of the identified advertisers. Advertisers are advised to have a thorough check of performance being achieved especially as they gradually resume after the Covid-19 pause. There will be many rogues who will try to replicate the market like scenarios to fake performance for advertisers, says mFilterIt. The advertisers need to be extra judicious with their spends and ensure that they are getting only genuine engagements to drive orders, sales and other objectives for which they are spending millions.