Organic installs lead global app fraud while India drives Android activity
AppsFlyer's 'State of Fraud for Marketers 2026' report identifies a shift in fraudulent activity toward organic traffic, which now accounts for 52% of all fraudulent installs globally. The report highlights that organic benchmarks are being artificially inflated to mask fraudulent paid installs, particularly impacting finance and gambling mobile applications.
Key Takeaways
- Organic traffic became the largest single fraud channel, representing 52% of fraudulent installs globally between Q1 2025 and Q1 2026.
- iOS fraud rates fell 33% year-on-year to 11.7%, dropping below Android's fraud levels for the first time in the report's history.
- India recorded a 65% affiliate fraud concentration, emerging as the primary driver for global Android fraud averages.
- Android gambling fraud rose to 59% year-on-year, with a 'Real Users Lift' of 175% indicating nearly two fake users for every real one acquired.
- Owned media fraud and demand-side platform fraud grew by 221% and 59%, respectively, as bad actors shifted to less-scrutinized channels.
Why It Matters
The shift to organic fraud compromises the foundational performance benchmarks used by every streaming and mobile marketer to calculate ROI. By polluting the 'clean' baseline of organic installs, fraudsters mask paid-channel manipulation, forcing brands to pay for non-existent users. This ecosystem-wide distortion particularly affects high-growth Android markets and verticals like finance and gambling where user acquisition spend remains highest. As iOS fraud declines relative to Android, media buyers must recalibrate platform-specific risk profiles. Marketers should monitor 'Real Users Lift' metrics to identify where reported growth is actually a byproduct of benchmark inflation rather than genuine audience expansion.
Additional Context
The migration toward more sophisticated fraud techniques aligns with broader cybersecurity shifts across the APAC region. According to Sumsub's 2026 Fraud Exposure Survey (February 2026), advanced 'identity fraud' using AI-generated personas increased 180% year-on-year as criminals moved away from simple phishing links toward telemetry tampering and deepfakes. This rise in sophistication is particularly acute in Southeast Asia's superapp ecosystems, where consolidated identity signals for payments and transport have become high-value targets for industrialized fraud rings.
While AppsFlyer noted a reduction in fraud in Vietnam and Singapore due to the shutdown of specific operations, the global financial impact remains severe. Per Statista (June 2026), total losses to digital ad fraud are forecast to reach $172 billion by 2028. Recent reporting from The Hacker News (June 2026) highlighted that even official stores are vulnerable; the Anatsa banking trojan recently bypassed Google Play review processes via a fake document viewer app that accumulated 90,000 downloads, further complicating the 'clean' install data marketers rely on for Android attribution.
In response to these threats, major platforms are shifting toward AI-powered defensive measures. Per Google's 2026 security blog (June 2026), Google Play Protect identified 27 million malicious sideloaded apps in 2025, a 100% increase from the previous year. However, as measurement on self-reporting networks (SRNs) becomes more restrictive, the AppsFlyer data suggests that fraud simply flows into owned media and external DSPs. This cat-and-mouse game has led to a widening 36x fraud gap between affiliate networks and SRNs, forcing a shift in and how marketers verify the authenticity of their mobile attribution funnels.
Read full article at securitybrief.asia
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