Mobile gaming’s fraud problem keeps moving. The defenses haven’t kept up.

Opinions expressed by Digital Journal contributors are their own.

In January 2024, Influence Mobile started seeing players who did not exist.

“Professional-grade, coordinated out of other countries, hitting us in the tens and tens of thousands of fake players at a time,” says Daniel Todd, CEO of the rewarded-gaming platform. “It ultimately cost our company tens of millions of dollars in lost revenue, and millions and millions more as we scrambled to retrench and rebuild.”

The attack was unusual in scale, not in kind. Ad fraud cost advertisers an estimated $84 billion globally in 2023 and is on track to reach $172 billion by 2028, according to Juniper Research, which put the share of mobile ad spend lost to fraud at roughly 30 percent.

The fraud is shifting toward traffic marketers rarely check

What has changed since is less the volume than the location. AppsFlyer’s State of Fraud for Marketers 2026, released in June and drawn from 106.4 billion installs across 246,000 apps, found that organic traffic, meaning installs a marketer does not pay for and therefore rarely scrutinizes, now accounts for 52 percent of all fraudulent installs. Affiliates and organic together account for nine in ten.

“If you can inflate that number, you shift what ‘normal’ looks like, and suddenly, fraudulent paid installs don’t look fraudulent anymore,” said Adam Smart, AppsFlyer’s global director of product for gaming.

The same data set found fraud patterns diverging sharply by platform, with Android install fraud rising year over year while iOS fraud fell by roughly a third.

Why rewarded platforms sit in the blast radius

Rewarded platforms are unusually exposed. Influence Mobile pays real players in cash and gift cards for playing games and completing offers, which means a fraudulent player does not waste an impression. They collect money.

“When you’re paying real money to real players, the fraudsters aren’t taking a small cut,” Todd says. “They’re going straight for the payout.”

Where an impression-based network absorbs invalid traffic as a measurement cost, a rewarded platform absorbs it as cash out the door.

That exposure shapes how the company measures its own traffic. Because payouts go to real people, engagement quality is not an abstract metric on a dashboard but the thing that determines whether a campaign is profitable.

“When the payout is real money, you have to know that the person on the other end is real and engaged,” Todd says. “That standard is higher than just counting installs, and we built toward it because our economics require it.”

Rebuilding the verification layer

After January 2024, Influence Mobile rebuilt its player verification system rather than patching the one it had. The replacement leans on behavioral signals rather than the device-level identifiers that fraud tooling has learned to spoof: how a player interacts with a game, the timing and rhythm of engagement, the consistency of spending.

“Device IDs, IP addresses, fingerprinting. Fraudsters know how to fake all of that,” Todd says. “What they can’t fake as easily is how a real human being actually plays a game over time. The rhythm, the pauses, the patterns.”

That direction tracks with where the wider industry has moved. Click flooding and SDK spoofing, attacks aimed at attribution signals rather than at user behavior, remain among the dominant fraud vectors measurement providers report.

The rebuild cost millions in engineering time and pulled resources away from product development. Todd describes the period as among the hardest in the company’s history.

Influence Mobile says its detection rate has improved since and that client confidence has recovered. Those assessments are the company’s own; it did not release underlying data, and no third party audited the results.

Juniper’s forecast has fraud losses roughly doubling by 2028, which puts a growing premium on verification that works at the behavioral level. Todd, whose career in mobile gaming and user acquisition is summarized in his biography, says the rebuild is now a permanent part of how Influence Mobile operates rather than a one-time response.

“We paid to learn this,” he says. “The lesson was that verification has to be built into the product, not bolted on after something goes wrong.”