The continued effectiveness of digital advertising is likely to drive continued expansion in the sector despite its vulnerability to manipulation and fraud, says the South China Morning Post. The largest advertising fraud ever committed was set up in December 2016: Russian hackers set up thousands of domains to impersonate high-traffic sites, on which they sold advertising space. They then created bots which artificially increased the number of views the adverts had. In a statement released last week, Facebook said that it had identified more than 200 accounts linked to Russia or other foreign actors who bought ads during the 2016 US election.
The continued effectiveness of digital advertising is likely to drive continued expansion in the sector despite its vulnerability to manipulation and fraud, says the South China Morning Post. The largest advertising fraud ever committed was set up in December 2016: Russian hackers set up thousands of domains to impersonate high-traffic sites, on which they sold advertising space. They then created bots which artificially increased the number of views the adverts had. This scam allegedly netted the hackers $5m per day in stolen advertising revenue.