Ad Fraud Prevention

Ad fraud steals $200B/year globally. Fraudsters: bot traffic (fake page views), click farms (humans clicking ads), domain spoofing (fake publisher sites), SDK spoofing (fake apps). Detection: IP reputation, device fingerprinting, behavioral analysis, machine learning. Why it matters: advertisers losing 10–50% of budget to fraud. Platforms losing credibility. Engineers preventing fraud save companies $millions/year. Salary: fraud engineers at Google, Facebook, MoPub earn $160k–$240k. Learning path: 1 week theory (fraud types, detection methods), 2 weeks building detectors (ML models, heuristic rules), 1 month production deployment (monitoring, feedback loops).