SA advertisers lose up to R12bn a year to ad fraud

South African advertisers could be losing between R2.8 billion and R12 billion annually due to fraudulent activity within programmatic online advertising, according to TruthsetsOnline.com's analysis. Marc Dhalluin, co-founder of the company, estimates South Africa's digital advertising market to be worth $2.1 billion to $2.4 billion, with programmatic advertising making up 40% to 50%.

While Dhalluin acknowledges that reliable fraud figures across the industry are hard to obtain, his company's analysis of multiple South African campaigns found wastage in programmatic advertising commonly ranging from 20% to 60%. This type of digital advertising fraud includes non-human activities that generate impressions, clicks, leads, and affiliate transactions, as well as manipulation of advertising impressions.

TruthsetsOnline.com's forensic media analytics involves inserting a JavaScript tag into ads to log data and flag potential fraudulent impressions based on factors such as location, IP address, and device. In a live campaign analyzed by the company, about 6.6 million impressions were examined, with 41% confirmed fraudulent and 12% confirmed legitimate. As the campaign was optimized, confirmed fraud dropped to 27%.

Fraudlogix, another company in the industry, analyzed a dataset of 105.7 billion impressions in 2025 and found a global invalid traffic (IVT) rate of 20.64%, or roughly one in five ad impressions displaying fraudulent or non-human activity. Jessica Lopez, COO of Fraudlogix, says, "When we see consistent patterns across devices, browsers, and geographies, we're not looking at anomalies – we're looking at the structural reality of ad fraud."

The issue of digital advertising fraud has been around since at least 2016, with US Senator Mark R. Warner highlighting the problem in correspondence with the US Federal Trade Commission. Warner claims that fraudulent bots create fake consumer traffic, driving up advertising costs. According to Fraud Blocker, digital advertising fraud costs the global industry $84 billion out of a $700 billion digital advertising market.

Fraudulent activities can include creating artificial traffic or manipulating ad serving, such as stacking multiple ads behind a visible one, serving ads in zero-by-zero pixel spaces, or generating advertising calls that never produce a visible ad. Advertisers might end up paying for impressions with no realistic opportunity for human engagement, resulting in a systematic diversion of significant portions of their budget.