Crowdsourcing for click fraud detection

Mobile ads are plagued with fraudulent clicks which is a major challenge for the advertising community. Although popular ad networks use many techniques to detect click fraud, they do not protect the client from possible collusion between publishers and ad networks. In addition, ad networks are not able to monitor the user’s activity for click fraud detection once they are redirected to the advertising site after clicking the ad. We propose a new crowdsource-based system called Click Fraud Crowdsourcing (CFC) that collaborates with both advertisers and ad networks in order to protect both parties from any possible click fraudulent acts. The system benefits from both a global view, where it gathers multiple ad requests corresponding to different ad network-publisher-advertiser combinations, and a local view, where it is able to track the users’ engagement in each advertising website. The results demonstrated that our approach offers a lower false positive rate (0.1) when detecting click fraud as opposed to proposed solutions in the literature, while maintaining a high true positive rate (0.9). Furthermore, we propose a new mobile ad charging model that benefits from our system to charge advertisers based on the duration spent in the advertiser’s website.