Rs 30 cr lost daily to ad fraud, yet only 5% of brands demand independent measurement

New Delhi: India is racing toward a digital-first economy where more than 1.4 billion people depend on online systems for payments, entertainment, services and governance. Yet the country finds itself trapped in a striking contradiction: digital has become the largest marketing cost for Indian companies, but its hygiene is the least audited.

In a market where over 50% of media spends are digital, and projected to reach 90%, only 5% of advertisers demand independent measurement or verification. This single gap, experts warn, is enabling a national-scale leakage of money, data, and trust.

“India loses Rs 30 crore every single day to digital ad fraud. That’s Rs 10,000 crore annually,” said Dhiraj Gupta, CTO, mFilterIT. Globally, the number stands at $100 billion, rising toward $172 billion.

‘Programmatic is India’s biggest money pit’: 31% invalid traffic

The worst leak, Gupta pointed out, sits inside open-auction programmatic, the very channel many marketers consider “efficient” because of its low CPMs.

Gupta said that open-auction programmatic inventory, priced at Rs 10-15 CPM, is flooded with junk supply. “The most fertile ground for ad fraud in India today is open-auction programmatic. Almost 30-40% of those impressions can be complete junk,” he explained.

He warned that SMEs are particularly vulnerable to low-cost pitches. “I have seen small brands get seduced by Rs 10-15 CPMs and stories about ‘transparent programmatic,’ but none of that is true. Programmatic is not transparent. Cheap CPMs come with a lot of junk traffic,” he said, in an interaction with BestMediaInfo.com.  

When these impressions are later audited, industry analyses show programmatic invalid traffic can go as high as 31%, pulling up the blended fraud level across channels to 12-14%. For advertisers over-indexed on video and open internet, the real loss is likely far higher than the average.

When machines mimic real humans

If programmatic is the leak, AI bots are the shape-shifting thieves exploiting it. Gupta highlighted the growing sophistication of bots. 

“AI-level bots are making data so polluted that all our traditional thumb rules, CTR benchmarks, and engagement benchmarks can be spoofed. Your 20 years of experience won’t help you anymore because bots can now mimic exactly what you expect to see,” he said. 

Adding context to this, Amit Relan, CEO, mFilterIT, said, “AI-based sites, made-for-advertising farms and AI-generated shops are a big problem because brands no longer know where their ads are actually appearing. Bots used to be simple, IP-based, VPN-based, proxy-based. Now they mimic human patterns. You can’t rely on just one layer of detection.”

The problem, they stressed, is no longer limited to fake traffic logs. It is reshaping how entire dashboards look and how marketers interpret reality.

When fake traffic creates fake marketing confidence

Relan explained the consequences of polluted data. “Bots don’t just eat budgets; they corrupt data. And corrupted data leads to wrong product decisions, wrong UX decisions, and wrong investments,” he said. 

Gupta added a real-world example. He stated, “One client thought their call-centre team was underperforming because 40% of leads were failing. The real problem? Those leads were bots.”

In other words, fraud isn’t just a media efficiency issue. Once bot-generated clicks and leads enter the system, they skew conversion rates, distort attribution models and redirect budgets away from what is genuinely working. The top of the funnel is fake, and everything downstream gets miscalculated.

Government ads are being served to bots. The impact, Gupta warned, isn’t limited to private brands. Even public communication is at risk. “If ChatGPT crawls a news website and the site shows a government ad at that moment, then the government ad is being shown to bot crawlers, including ChatGPT, not a human,” Gupta said. 

This revelation shows how even premium government inventory can be skewed by automated traffic. The government believes it is reaching citizens on credible news platforms; in reality, a meaningful slice of that exposure could be going to bots and crawlers, with no human attention at the other end.

CTV’s clean image is cracking

While most of the conversation around fraud focuses on the open internet, Connected TV (CTV),  widely perceived as a “premium” and safer environment, is also showing cracks. Relan cautioned that the biggest issue in CTV is not bots but frequency and control. 

“In CTV, most of the issues today are around frequency caps and frequency controls. If I set a cap of three and a viewer ends up seeing the same ad ten times, there’s clearly a control problem,” said Relan. 

What frustrates brands is that they are setting frequency caps at their end, yet consumers routinely complain about seeing the same creative 15-20 times in a single week. That disconnect, Relan argued, points to the need for independent verification, even in channels marketed as “brand-safe” by default.

He added that walled gardens like Meta and Google are not inherently cleaner. He explained, “Most major CTV platforms are open to measurement. It’s not about exclusivity; it’s about going through the measurement process and providing log-level transparency where possible.”

Without that log-level transparency, advertisers may never know whether their carefully planned caps, brand safety filters and targeting rules are actually being honoured.

Search remains the cleanest, but cleanliness is not the same as transparency

Amid the gloom, Gupta did call out one relatively safer zone. Gupta gave a rare endorsement of search, saying, “Search is the cleanest. If I have to pick one, I’d say search. But the real estate is changing, the formats are changing, and walls are going up. If someone is truly clean, they should have no problem allowing independent measurement.”

Search, by design, is intent-driven and less cluttered than open auction displays. However, as more inventory formats appear and platforms tighten access to raw data, even search will require stronger, neutral oversight to maintain trust. Clean channels, both of them emphasised, must also be measurable channels.

Outdated metrics, AI-led fraud and a fragmented funnel are accelerating losses

mFilterIt’s latest Ad Fraud Intelligence Report warns that ad fraud has evolved faster than the industry’s ability to measure or govern it. The report notes that AI-driven bots now imitate real human behaviour, easily bypassing rule-based systems and making basic metrics such as viewability, clicks, CTR and installs unreliable indicators of real engagement.

A key finding is that India’s digital leakage, estimated at 12% of total spend, is no longer a technical error but a direct P&L risk, with contaminated data influencing media planning, product decisions and performance optimisation. It challenges long-held industry assumptions by showing that fraud is non-linear and moves across the entire funnel. 

Viewable impressions often attract bot activity; premium and closed environments are not immune, and retargeting pools show contamination right at the source.

The report highlights that contextual blind spots, especially in India’s heavily vernacular content landscape, cause keyword-based brand-safety tools to miss unsafe or unsuitable environments. Performance metrics are similarly distorted by upstream fraud, pushing marketers to optimise toward invalid signals and reinforcing a cycle of wasted spend.

In an era where digital spending is exploding, India’s advertising ecosystem faces a paradox: massive budgets, minimal verification, and maximum vulnerability.

Until advertisers demand independent measurement at scale, India will continue to lose Rs 30 crore every single day, making ad fraud not just a marketing issue but a national digital integrity problem.