I'm struggling to follow the actual narrative presented in the chopped up Twitter style. It sounds like there were was a third party ad network involved?

One thing we learned a long time ago is never to trust "engagement" data from platforms (be it Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, whatever). There are enough random user behaviors that you generate a ton of noise. You need to build larger, more robust attribution models that tie ad spending directly to revenue sources - new leads, new accounts, purchases, etc. Patting yourself on the back for how many shares or clicks you get is not great.

as a nonexpert its hard for me to say too but perhaps you will benefit from hearing directly from source - the performance marketing guy at Uber who found all this out: https://www.marketingtodaypodcast.com/194-historic-ad-fraud-... honestly i am not sure if he did a good thing by asking all these questions, or was partially to blame for gross incompetence managing a 150mm ad budget, or both. (the chronology of when exactly he took over matters, it seems he was only in the job about a year)

and of course for more detail the full text of the fraud suit is public https://www.adexchanger.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Uberf...