What is install fraud?

Offers pay for an action, so someone who can fake the action, or claim it, can get paid without sending a real user. Most fraud follows one of two patterns: making fake users or taking credit for real ones. Taking credit often means firing a tap just before a real install, so the fraudster’s click is the last one on record.

Example: 40 accounts on a rewarded app, all on one phone, install Harbor Blocks and each claim a reward. Each install looks fine alone. Put side by side, one phone played 40 different people.

A device farm is a room of phones, or software that imitates them, that installs apps over and over and resets between runs to look new. A click farm uses people or scripts to tap links in bulk, often through proxies to hide where they are.

The tells are in the details. No single signal proves it, so checks look at patterns across accounts.

Every tap goes through our checks before the redirect, and we keep comparing each offer’s traffic across publishers and over time. Users behind what looks wrong are rejected, with a reason and an end date. When a user we paid for turns out to be one of several accounts, we reverse that pay and send a reversal postback with the reason. More in Fraud Defense and How Fraud Defense works.