Our Fight Against Fraud

Last week MediaMath learned of a specific type of malicious activity being perpetrated within the RTB ecosystem. One of our clients was using our technology to purchase ad inventory and then using third-party ad tags to offer it for resale multiple times under false pretenses on exchanges such as LiveRail, and AOL. While the initial purchase which they executed on our platform appears to have been legitimate, the subsequent behavior is a clear violation of our terms of use, and we have acted swiftly to shut down the activity.

Combatting ad fraud has been and remains a top priority for MediaMath. We have made substantial investments to protect our clients through a broad and evolving array of proprietary and external technologies, business protocols and processes (see: TerminalOne Delivery Management,TAG and Digital Ad Leaders Announce New Program to Block Fraudulent Data Center Traffic, and more generally The Other Half of the Battle Against Fraud.) These measures have made TerminalOne significantly more resistant to fraudulent supply than other buying platforms in the market.

We are therefore doubly frustrated that our technology was involved in the perpetration of this malicious activity. As a true self-service platform with a wide and growing set of supported use cases, the responsibility on us is that much higher to guard against inappropriate uses of our technology. We will therefore be enhancing our existing measures to not only identify and prevent fraud on the supply side but on the demand side as well. These measures will include:

• Enhanced screening of prospective client organizations and principals, including strict vetting for industry history and reputation
• Additional monitoring of client settings and usage to identify suspicious buy-side activity
• New tools for our partners to use in delivering real-time data on malicious activity back into our systems for immediate response
• Modification of our “strikes” policy to deal more swiftly and summarily with truly malicious behavior

To everyone in the ecosystem, we urge you to reach out to your partners and vendors, be they SSP, DSPs, or anything in the middle, if you ever observe questionable activity. This behavior, and others like it, damages the market confidence in RTB and programmatic marketing in general. We are committed to helping eliminate all forms of fraud in our industry through advances in technology, continued education and awareness, and close collaboration with our clients and partners.