IAS Exposes Arcade Android Gaming Ad Fraud, Raising Fresh Concerns For Mobile Advertisers

Integral Ad Science has revealed a sophisticated ad fraud operation dubbed “Arcade” that targets Android gaming inventory, raising urgent questions about traffic quality and budget safety for mobile advertisers. From our perspective at ClickPatrol, the exposure of Arcade is another clear sign that fraudsters are shifting deeper into in-app environments where many performance marketers are aggressively scaling campaigns.

What IAS Found In The Arcade Ad Fraud Scheme

According to IAS, Arcade abused Android gaming apps by creating fake ad impressions and manipulating in-app environments to siphon spend from advertisers that believed they were reaching real players. The scheme focused on programmatic inventory where large volumes of impressions can be traded with limited transparency, creating ideal conditions for invalid traffic to spread.

For PPC and performance teams relying on mobile placements, this type of operation means that a share of budget meant for real gamers can instead be diverted to fraudulent activity that never has a chance to convert. It also means analytics are distorted, since dashboards may show reach, impressions and engagement that simply did not happen.

Key Findings From The Arcade Investigation

The IAS investigation into Arcade highlights several important patterns that PPC and mobile app advertisers should pay close attention to.

• Arcade focused on Android gaming environments, exploiting the popularity and scale of gaming apps as a monetization channel.
• The scheme generated fake ad activity that mimicked legitimate impressions, creating invalid traffic that passed basic checks.
• Fraudulent behavior was concentrated in programmatic supply, where automated buying and reselling of inventory can obscure the original source.
• Advertisers buying in-app or in-game placements risked paying for non-human or non-viewable impressions with no real user behind them.
• The impact went beyond wasted spend and directly affected reporting accuracy, making it harder to evaluate campaign performance.

Why Android Gaming Apps Are A Prime Target For Ad Fraud

We see Android gaming inventory as particularly attractive for fraudsters for several reasons. First, gaming apps often deliver high impression volumes and frequent ad refreshes, which can be exploited to generate large amounts of fake activity quickly. Second, many advertisers bid aggressively for gaming audiences because of their strong engagement metrics, which pushes up CPMs and CPCs and makes the fraud more profitable.

Third, in-app environments can be technically complex to monitor. Signals like viewability, device behavior, and session patterns are harder to interpret than on standard web placements. This complexity creates blind spots where operations like Arcade can hide if advertisers rely only on simple filters or basic blocklists.

Implications For PPC Budgets And Performance

For performance marketers running app install, engagement or remarketing campaigns, a scheme like Arcade can silently drain budgets. Even if your primary focus is on cost per acquisition, polluted traffic at the top of the funnel affects everything downstream, from lookalike audiences to automated bidding strategies in Google Ads, Meta Ads and Microsoft Ads.

When a portion of your clicks and impressions come from invalid traffic, bid strategies can start optimizing toward poor-quality placements and devices. Algorithms may falsely conclude that certain gaming apps are high performers based on fake engagement signals, pushing more budget into exactly the environments the fraudsters control.

The end result is a double hit: wasted spend on fake users and distorted data that makes it harder to scale the parts of your account that genuinely work.

How ClickPatrol Views The Arcade Discovery

From our vantage point at ClickPatrol, the exposure of Arcade reinforces a trend we see across many accounts: fraud is becoming more specialized and more tightly integrated into specific app categories and traffic sources. Generic fraud filters, IP blocklists or simple frequency caps are no longer enough to protect PPC budgets.

Modern fraud schemes rely on behavioral patterns that look almost legitimate when viewed at the level of a single click or impression. That makes per-click analysis and correlation across multiple signals essential. We routinely see patterns where only a subset of placements or a handful of app IDs are responsible for the majority of wasted spend, particularly in mobile and in-app campaigns.

Protecting Mobile And In-App Campaigns From Similar Schemes

To reduce exposure to operations like Arcade in your own accounts, we recommend a mix of traffic analysis, targeting hygiene and independent protection.

Audit Your Android Gaming And In-App Inventory

Start by isolating Android gaming and broader in-app placements in your Google Ads, Meta Ads and Microsoft Ads accounts. Review performance by app, placement or publisher and look for red flags such as:

• High click or impression volume with unusually low conversions or post-install engagement.
• Spikes in spend from a small number of app IDs or placements over short periods.
• Suspicious device patterns, such as many conversions coming from the same device models, OS versions or time zones that do not match your target audience.

Tighten Targeting And Exclusions

Where possible, shift from broad app category targeting to curated lists of placements that have proven to deliver real value. Exclude apps or placements that show a poor ratio of clicks or impressions to meaningful actions such as sign-ups, purchases or retained app users.

Use IP and device-level exclusions when you repeatedly see suspicious behavior from the same sources. However, keep in mind that sophisticated fraud operations can rotate devices and networks, so this is only a partial defense.

Use Independent Click Fraud Protection

The most effective way to catch operations like Arcade is to evaluate each click and impression with deeper behavioral checks than the ad platforms typically provide. ClickPatrol is designed for exactly this problem.

Our systems analyze a wide set of signals around each click, including device behavior, timing, repetition, and interaction patterns, to identify likely fake or low-quality traffic in real time. When we flag suspicious activity, we automatically block further clicks from that source in platforms such as Google Ads, Meta and Microsoft Ads, helping to stop the budget leak.

This approach not only cuts wasted spend but also cleans up the data that your bidding strategies, attribution models and optimization decisions rely on. By removing invalid traffic from your campaigns, you get a clearer view of what is actually working and can scale with more confidence.

What PPC Teams Should Do Next

The Arcade discovery is another reminder that mobile and in-app environments carry real fraud risk, even when inventory appears to be brand safe or high quality on the surface. For PPC and performance teams, the priority should be to treat traffic quality as a core optimization lever, not an afterthought.

We recommend that advertisers:

• Review recent spend and performance on Android gaming and in-app placements to quantify potential exposure.
• Segment reporting by placement, app or publisher to identify and pause suspicious sources.
• Introduce independent verification and click fraud protection to continuously monitor incoming traffic quality.
• Rebuild optimization logic and automated bidding around cleaner, validated data so that your campaigns do not keep feeding fraudulent supply.

For advertisers that want to test how much of their current budget may be affected by invalid traffic, you can start a free trial of ClickPatrol or speak with our team to review your account. The faster you identify and block fraudulent activity, the quicker you can redirect spend to real users and improve your return on ad spend.

Abisola

Meet Abisola! As the content manager at ClickPatrol, she’s the go-to expert on all things fake traffic. From bot clicks to ad fraud, Abisola knows how to spot, stop, and educate others about the sneaky tactics that inflate numbers but don’t bring real results.

View all posts by Abisola (Abisola)

Related Articles

Advertisers Confront Fake Installs And Flawed Attribution With Tougher Questions

To Tackle Fake Installs And Dodgy Attribution, Advertisers Must Ask Better Questions

Online Ad Fraud: Why It Is Growing And How Advertisers Can Fight Back