Ad Fraud Expert on Scams, Bots, Spoofs

Jeromy Sonne is a Facebook ad pro turned fraud detection expert. His firm, Daypart, advises agencies and big-spend advertisers on the accuracy and legitimacy of their campaigns.

Ad fraud, he says, can mean billed bot impressions, scam offers, and even money laundering, adding that the problem is worse on programmatic networks than on siloed platforms such as Meta and Google.

In our recent conversation, Jeromy addressed the reality of today’s ad fraud and how advertisers prevent and detect it.

The entire audio is embedded below. The transcript is edited for clarity and length.

Eric Bandholz: What the heck do you do?

Jeromy Sonne: I’m the founder of an ad fraud detection firm called Daypart.

I started in Facebook ads in 2011. I did that for a long time, mainly promoting mobile apps, and slowly switched over to ecommerce.

After that I founded an ad tech company called Decibel. It was a platform for podcast ads that, unfortunately, didn’t work out.

I then fell into the world of combating ad fraud on behalf of agencies and other ad tech companies. That’s what I’m doing now. It’s been more successful than anything I’ve ever done. We help advertisers by stopping the bad guys. Clients retain me to look into the accuracy and legitimacy of ads.

Bandholz: What is ad fraud?

Sonne: It’s an umbrella term. There’s the obvious fraud of charging for bot impressions or automated clicks. Then there are instances of advertisers paying, say, $30 CPM for an ad on a TV show but, instead, it ran on a low-quality website. At the extreme end, there’s money laundering, where criminals buy ads from their own shell companies.

Bandholz: Is that on Meta and Google?

Sonne: It’s worse for so-called programmatic ads, but no, not on walled gardens such as Meta and Google. They are nominally better, and the teams there are a bit more responsive to it. But it’s such a complex ecosystem, especially when you’re dealing with crooks running the scams and trying to avoid detection.

It might be a dude with a scam offer posting pictures of himself in a Lamborghini. Or it might start with a legitimate offer and evolve into a scam.

The best way to increase your return on ad spend is to cut out fraud. Real ads going to real humans is the best optimization tactic.

Bandholz: Our entire ad budget at Beardbrand, my company, is going to Meta. What percentage of impressions or clicks are from bots or unscrupulous pages?

Sonne: It depends. On Meta, you’d look at its Audience Network, which is the Wild West of advertising.

Ads on mobile apps are generally higher risk. Occasionally Meta might wipe out, like, 10% of clicks or impressions because they were bots. That could include AI agents or bots using a human’s account.

Again, Meta tends to be responsive, and the problem is worse on the open web — display ads, video ads, mobile apps, that sort of thing. Upwards of one-third or more of ad spend is likely fraudulent to some degree, especially on programmatic networks.

Bandholz: How does an advertiser know fraudulent clicks or impressions versus what the ad platforms claim?

Sonne: Transparency is the key. Given enough data, you can start to put things together.

Here’s an example. I was looking at a set of mobile ads recently and, at first glance, they seemed legit. Then I dug into the devices they were running on.

These were all supposedly running on iPads with Intel chips, but iPads never had Intel chips. The publishers were clearly spoofing devices, using a workaround, running a bot farm, or something similar. So put on your Sherlock Holmes hat and look for patterns or claims that don’t add up.

Even Meta has this problem. An advertiser can block shady apps on the Audience Network or even use its (the advertiser’s) own ad server and look for discrepancies between that and what the ad platform says.

There’s no magic bullet; it’s trust but verify. When you have a discrepancy, call it out and work with the ad platform to get a refund.

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Bandholz: At what point does it make sense to hire a firm like yours to help recoup some of that fraud?

Sonne: I generally work with agencies that are spending several million per month on open web programmatic ads, such as connected television and audio. That’s after they’ve tapped out Meta and Google.

So companies spending $25 million to $50 million a year can justify the cost of our services. Advertisers solely on Meta and Google are typically below that.

Again, advertisers are marginally safer in those walled gardens, which police their own ecosystem better than others. I have a lot of respect for Comcast. Beeswax, Comcast’s programmatic buying platform, is tightly run.

But the safer bet is to work with an agency that knows what it’s doing and can stop fraudulent activity.

Bandholz: How can people contact you and hire your services?

Sonne: Our site is Daypart.ai. I’m on X and LinkedIn.