IP addresses are USELESS for detecting or blocking fraud (2024)

In the past,

- bots come from data center IP addresses

- humans come from residential IP addresses

but now,

- humans also come from data center IP addresses (when using VPNs)

- bots also appear to come from residential IP addresses (when disguising themselves with residential proxy services)

Declared bots (orange) -- the ones that say their name honestly -- come from obvious data centers like Amazon and Google Cloud.

Search crawlers (yellow) come from obvious data centers. But note in the example below, the HTTP_USER_AGENT can be easily falsified to appear to be "Googlebot." But by cross referencing the name of the ISP, we can see some of those are not the real Googlebot.

IP addresses are not useful for BLOCKING fraud, because

- blocking datacenter IP addresses won't stop bots because more advanced bots disguise their IP addresses using residential proxy services (which make them appear to come from residential IP addresses)

- blocking datacenter IP addresses won't stop the bots because bots dump useless IP addresses and get new ones within seconds of the IP address being blocked

- blocking datacenter IP addresses means you may block real humans using VPNs

- blocking residential IP addresses means you may block real human visitors; residential IP addresses are households which can have dozens of devices (a few computers, laptops, iPads, smart TVs, smartphones, etc.) Not all of the devices are compromised with malware and committing ad fraud.

meets the legal definition of fraud

n. "the intentional use of deceit, a trick or some dishonest means to deprive another of his/her/its money, property or a legal right. A party who has lost something due to fraud is entitled to file a lawsuit for damages against the party acting fraudulently, and the damages may include punitive damages as a punishment or public example due to the malicious nature of the fraud."

TAG and IAB are intentionally selling a block list of 100 million fraud IP addresses to their own members. Those IP addresses have been useless for years, do not block the fraud, and add tremendous computing burden to the RTB (real time bidding) process. I consider that fraud; and clients should sue TAG and IAB and get years of their money back, as a class.

How to use FouAnalytics on-site and in-ad

Using FouAnalytics, advertisers find the sites and apps that cheat using fraudulent means to steal ad dollars and add them to block lists. IP addresses are only one ingredient used in the process of fraud detection. See the screenshots and examples in the following 2 articles about how to use FouAnalytics on your site and in your digital ads.

How Site-Owners Use FouAnalytics to Troubleshoot Bot Traffic

How to use FouAnalytics to Scrutinize Clicks from Programmatic Campaigns