Brands Have Had Enough. They’re Suing Over Ad Fraud.

In December 2019, Uber filed a lawsuit against five ad networks – Fetch, BidMotion, Taptica, YouAppi, and AdAction Interactive – and 100 additional mobile companies for allegedly wasting millions of dollars on “low-quality or fraudulent” ads.

The app-based taxi-hailing service has previously filed a similar lawsuit against their Agency of Record, Fetch, but it refiled the suit and added the new ad networks list above which marketing watchdogs have presumed are the sub-publishers that Uber claims its ad networks partnered with to create fraudulent traffic.

According to Uber, its ads were not converting, and after further experimentation, the transport network found that a full two-thirds of its ad budget – $100 million – wasn’t needed. As a result, Uber is seeking unspecified damages from the five ad networks named in the lawsuit.

In January 2021, Uber won a separate lawsuit against Phunware Inc. where their Uber app installations were largely falsified. Here’s direct quotes from the lawsuit (bold emphasis is our own).

As confirmed in discovery, most of the Uber app installations that Phunware claimed to have delivered were generated by a fraudulent process known as “click flooding,” which reports a higher number of clicks than those occurring.

Two former Phunware employees had conducted an internal investigation discovering that Phunware had falsely billed Uber for ad clicks they did not deliver. But Phunware continued its fraudulent practices. As evidenced in discovery, a widescale culture of fraud continued for many months. For example, in an email sent on Oct. 31, 2016, a Phunware employees wrote: “Guys it’s… time to spin some more BS to Uber to keep the lights on.

To compound matters further, it was discovered that Phunware had placed Uber’s ads on pornographic websites, in direct violation of its contract and advertising standards. Even worse, Phunware attempted to cover this up as well by falsifying reports, which made it appear as if the ads were placed on legitimate, non-pornographic sites instead.”

Uber is seeing first-hand the impacts of fraud on their budgets and is taking aggressive action to fix the problem (you can just use Fraud Blocker to help)

Criteo, a display advertising network, filed a lawsuit that alleges rival firm SteelHouse (now rebranded as “MNTM”) ran a “counterfeit click fraud scheme.” Criteo says it lost a client after SteelHouse made the shoe retailer TOMS perform a head-to-head comparison between ad tech vendors’ products. Both companies place ads by “retargeting” – dropping a cookie on a user’s browser when they have visited a website.

Criteo’s lawsuit alleges that SteelHouse used “bots and other automated means” to generate fake clicks on TOMS’ ads, which led the retailer to believe that Criteo’s product was less effective than SteelHouse’s. SteelHouse is accused of using the method to fraudulently promote to customers that it “consistently outperformed” Criteo in head-to-head comparisons, resulting in an important business loss for Criteo.

Criteo is seeking unspecified damages from SteelHouse.