There’s a new kind of ad fraud, essentially the advertising world’s version of money laundering.
DoubleVerify found fraudsters are launching bot networks to circumvent ads.txt protections, which are designed to allow publishers to list authorized sellers of their inventory.
The botnets are scraping content off websites, adding new ad slots to falsified versions of the scraped pages, and then selling the fraudulent ad slots under fake URLs through authorized resellers listed on a publisher’s ads.txt file.
