Ad fraud
Ad fraud is strictly prohibited. Ad interactions generated for the purpose of tricking an ad network into believing traffic is from authentic user interest is ad fraud, which is a form of invalid traffic. Ad fraud may be the byproduct of developers implementing ads in disallowed ways, such as showing hidden ads, automatically clicking ads, altering or modifying information and otherwise leveraging non-human actions (spiders, bots, etc.) or human activity designed to produce invalid ad traffic. Invalid traffic and ad fraud is harmful to advertisers, developers and users, and leads to long-term loss of trust in the mobile ads ecosystem.
Examples of common violations
- An app that renders ads that are not visible to the user.
- An app that automatically generates clicks on ads without the user's intention or that produces equivalent network traffic to fraudulently give click credits.
- An app sending fake installation attribution clicks to get paid-for installations that did not originate from the sender’s network.
- An app that makes ads pop up when the user is not within the app interface.
- False representations of the ad inventory by an app, for example, an app that communicates to ad networks that it is running on an iOS device when it is in fact running on an Android device, or an app that misrepresents the package name that is being monetised.