Com Olho, becomes India’s first company to win the patent for advertising fraud detection

Com Olho, one of the fastest-growing companies to protect enterprises from digital frauds, has become India’s first company to receive a patent for Advertising Fraud detection. The company creates innovative – new-age technology to help enterprises mitigate the risks arising from various kinds of digital frauds.

Digital advertising fraud is on a dramatic rise as digital advertising has become an integral part of the online marketing strategies for forward-moving companies. According to a KPMG report, digital advertising spend is expected to touch a whopping of ₹23,600 crores in FY2020. Additionally, industry experts state a minimum of 15% of the ad-spend is lost in advertising fraud, which is roughly ₹3500 crores. Consequently, it fuels the growth of malicious players and impairs consumer experience, misinformation, and fake news.

Com Olho, being a leading cloud-based machine learning platform, uses AI and non-rule-based methods to detect data attribution manipulation. This forms the core basis of a majority of performance marketing players today. Consequently, this helps in the detection of programmatic manipulation of attribution data and saves unproductive marketing spends.

Commenting on the adversity in digital advertising space, Abhinav Bangia, Founder & CTO at Com Olho says, “Software engineers today are hired on a high-payroll to build malicious apps, domains, and technology to evade from fraud while they are kept unaware of how this technology would fuel ad fraud, transactional fraud, and data theft. This results in bringing in financial surplus for companies. We must teach our engineers about ethical technology and empower them to report such cases to the government to protect our citizens from the burgeoning record of digital malpractices.”

Lloyd Mathias, Seed Investor & Advisor at Com Olho says, “Ad Fraud is growing eves as Digital Adverting’s share of total ad spend is growing. While performance marketing has been driving attribution metrics like cost per click, cost per engagement, and cost per transaction; what is not being realized is many of these clicks, transactions, and engagement are fraudulent and just a way to claim attribution. Com Olho’s solution is just what large digital advertisers need to reduce if not eliminate digital ad fraud completely.”

Most of the advertisers today misinterpret that they are immune to sale-based performance campaigns. However, using these disguised apps, networks constantly monitor consumer devices for conversions, derailing the consumer experience, and stealing advertising dollars from advertisers and social networks.

On the other hand, consumers today are constantly being monitored by fake mobile apps which form a publisher network for top networks in India. These publisher apps are a subset of ad-networks and use social networks to show ads on their inventory, in return when this user base converts, a fake click is inserted to steal traffic. This raises a huge concern of cybersecurity for advertisers.

The Ad-fraud Detection patent leverages the knowledge to uncover a complete adware-based supply-side network. These apps not only steal advertising dollars from social networks but also make a financial surplus on the ad-network side by offering conversion leads. This is one of the reasons why ad-networks today can demonstrate hyper-growth that are simply the privacy and brand safety violators.

Furthermore, the apps also sell consumer data which leads to a majority of cyberattacks including data breaches, cases like Jamtara money laundering, etc. On winning an Ad-Fraud Detection patent which is deterministic and admissible in court, it would help build case files for advertisers per ad-network including social giants and help them acquire techno-legal capabilities to dampen the rising tide of digital fraud.

Com Olho is recognized by Startup India, Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade, Government of India. The company is one of the fastest-growing cloud-based machine learning platforms that makes it easy for CXO’s to understand their consumers using behavior analytics, machine learning, and data science.