Most fraud in app campaigns is not clever. It is volume pushed through gaps in attribution, and it leaves patterns you can see in data you already have. Before you approve an invoice from any partner, ours included, check these five.
1. Click-to-install time that is too short or too flat
Real users take time to reach the store, download and open an app. When a source shows a large share of installs within seconds of the click, something is injecting clicks just before installs that would have happened anyway. When the distribution is flat across many hours, a source is usually firing huge numbers of clicks and waiting for organic installs to land on them.
Check: chart click-to-install time by source. A healthy source has a peak within the first hour and a long tail. A sharp spike in the first seconds, or no peak at all, needs a closer look.
2. Clicks that dwarf installs
A source sending millions of clicks for a handful of installs is often click spamming. Attribution platforms give the install to the last click, so a source that fires enough clicks will steal credit for users it never reached.
3. Devices that look alike
Install farms and emulators repeat themselves: the same device model, OS version, language or screen size in proportions no real audience has. Compare each source's device mix against your organic users.
4. Traffic from data centres
People do not install apps from cloud servers. Installs from data-centre IP ranges, anonymous proxies or one narrow IP block are a strong signal of bots or device farms.
5. Installs that never do anything
The quietest form of fraud passes every technical check and then nothing happens: no second session, no registration, no purchase. Track day-one and day-seven retention and your key event rate by source. A source far below your average is not sending real users, whatever its install count.
What to do when you find it
- Reject the affected conversions with the evidence, by sub-ID, within the window in your agreement.
- Ask your partner to pause the source, not the whole campaign.
- Move payout to a deeper event if install-level fraud keeps returning. Fraud is far harder to fake at a purchase or a verified account.
At BoonAds these checks run on every campaign, and rejected conversions are reversed on your invoice and recovered from the source that sent them.