Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend

Re:Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their... by zpeti on Monday January 04, 2021 @03:55AM (#25629007)

Reading this thread I really start to feel people don't understand what fraud is. You shouldn't be calling it fraud when in the next paragraph you say that FB does work for impulse buys and not "ozonetel"

Just because your ads didn't convert, or 90% of the traffic you buy didn't convert, doesn't make it fraud. Fraud is malice, with the intention to defraud someone and not deliver what you promise, with intent. This is completely different to you setting a target demographic on FB and Google and it not converting.

I imagine most people calling fraud in this thread aren't actually talking about fraud, just non converting traffic. There could be a million reasons for this. You haven't set up conversion tracking, your targeting could be off, or your product or landing page is just crap. Calling it fraud is not helpful.

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Re:Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their... by speeder on Monday January 04, 2021 @08:00AM (#25630732)

I think you misunderstood what he wrote.

My business also sell only to other business, and Google kept calling us nagging us to do some "experiments".

One of them involved enabling "display network" ads on mobile.

Like the guy side... it "attracts" fraud.

So, what kind of fraud?

I am not talking about no conversion or no click, I am talking about all our clicks, or almost all to the point it was impossible to tell the difference, were fraudulent, for example most our ad spending was going into a musical keyboard app for kids, that has nothing to do with my business, despite me blocking the category multiple times, the app in question just kept being reuploaded in different categories to avoid bans.

When I went to check out the app Google Play page, it was rated 1 star, and lots of complaints similar to this:

"App is just a fraud, it keeps opening ads in the middle of the song while my toddler is playing to force my toddler to click the ads, then it automatically closes the page that opened and keep running, using all my battery and making my toddler see weird stuff."

So yeah, it is fraud, it is not "failed conversion", it is an app conning toddlers into clicking my ads that are selling stuff that shouldn't be anywhere near a toddler, both the parents and my business were being scammed.

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Re:Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their... by hn_throwaway_99 on Monday January 04, 2021 @12:09PM (#25634312)

You've misunderstood what I wrote. When I'm saying that "90% of what we got what was fraud", I mean that 90% of the traffic that did convert from FB ads were users that were trying to scam us (it was a financial services app), I mean literally steal money from us with things like stolen credit cards.

The general user quality you get from Facebook Ads is atrocious.

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Re:Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their... by TimSchumann on Monday January 04, 2021 @05:37AM (#25629637)

> You shouldn't be calling it fraud when in the next paragraph you say that FB does work for impulse buys and not "ozonetel"

I don’t believe they were saying the adds themselves were fraud, merely that they had a higher than average propensity to attract fraudulent customers.

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Re:Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their... by dd36 on Monday January 04, 2021 @05:09AM (#25629446)

Here are the California jury instructions for fraud and deceit: https://www.justia.com/trials-litigation/docs/caci/1900/

There are definitely multiple categories this would fall under.

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