CPA (cost per action) fraud is a type of click fraud aimed at draining advertisers’ marketing budgets by faking actions post-app install.
What is CPA fraud?
- Fraudsters aim to take advantage of LTV-focused campaigns and users’ activity post install, by measuring quality in-app events.
- These bad actions will either fake events manually or program bot scripts to mimic actual user behavior within the app.
How does CPA fraud work?
- Fraudsters will go a long way to pass their installs as legitimate, by pretending to be engaged users post install, or aim for the bigger rewards often available in CPA-based campaigns.
- They invest significant funds into studying real user behavior patterns via malicious software (aka malware) or self-operated apps, and later “teach” their bots to behave similarly in apps under their attack.