Fraud in focus: A Q&A with Glispa’s Senior Compliance Manager Evgeniia Pshenitcyna

For our Q&A series with industry experts at Glispa, we sat down with Evgeniia Pshenitcyna, our new Senior Compliance Manager. She started out in the advertising industry eight years ago and as her career progressed, she decided to delve into the data behind it and use that knowledge to further compliance. Read on to find out where she sees the challenges and opportunities in the fight against mobile fraud, what part Glispa is playing here, and her predictions for 2019.

Evgeniia, can you explain your role within the company?

My role at Glispa is to establish and support an efficient compliance strategy. This will help ensure our advertisers get compliant traffic for their campaigns and publishers receive all the insights they need to optimize their traffic.

What are you most excited about in this role?

The challenge of tackling mobile ad fraud really excites me. The industry is currently facing a tough uphill battle as fraudsters are becoming much more sophisticated every day, which means catching them is getting trickier. The more advanced fraudsters get, the more technical and smarter the industry needs to be in order to stay ahead. This non-stop competition is why I feel there is always room for improvement, and this is definitely something that motivates me.

Where does the industry currently stand in protecting itself against ad fraud?

We’re seeing major improvements and serious headway is being made, that’s for sure. There are now multiple third-party fraud detection tools available on the market as well as fraud packages offered by the main Mobile Measurement Partners (MMPs) like Adjust or Appsflyer. Also, in-house, fraud detection and prevention solutions that were uncommon a year ago are now becoming an industry standard. But still, the speed in which the ad tech space is moving is staggering and a lot more must be done in the future. By that, I’m referring to things like automation and enhancing existing systems and algorithms.

What do you consider the biggest challenges and opportunities when fighting mobile ad fraud?

When talking about developing effective solutions for detecting and preventing fraud, I think the rapid rise of SDK spoofing is still among the biggest and most pressing challenges at the moment. This is when fraudsters take advantage of a real device and use it to generate fake installs and actions. Because it involves real smartphones and delivers legitimate looking installs with good quality, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to identify. As with many mobile ad scams, the hard part tends to come from a technical perspective – fraud detection and prevention systems must be easily adjustable, scalable and stable to deal with these sophisticated issues. This is a lot easier said than done, of course, but I think the industry is on the right path.

As far as opportunities go, I’d like to stress the importance of proactive cooperation between departments within any ad tech organization, as well as between different companies within the industry.

There’s a massive amount of data and knowledge out there and since we’re all fighting the same fight, it’s crucial that insights and lessons learned are continuously shared across the ad tech landscape.

What is Glispa doing to combat mobile ad fraud?

The Glispa approach is twofold: carrying out daily optimizations based on quality and compliance KPIs and preventing fraud by blocking suspicious outliers on a conversion level. Day in and day out we are working on innovating our detection processes and prevention tools. I believe Glispa is doing an amazing job here, but as I mentioned already, the nature of the industry means there is always room for improvement.

Is there anything the industry doesn’t focus on that needs to be addressed more vigorously?

MMPs, advertisers and networks (publishers) are still not working together as much as they could be. The only way they will achieve their compliance goals is to constantly improve their collaboration. As an example, advertisers could pay some more attention to sharing all key funnel events within their network, instead of only one or two, which can be easily faked. Considering three to five events from the top-down funnel allows for a better understanding of trends and proactively cuts out outliers.

How do you determine if publishers are good partners?

Before getting on boarded, every publisher passes a detailed fraud check that not only includes basic CR, CTIT, quality and MMP rejection level checks, but also another multiple compliance checks. Without this, they won’t be able to run on a big scale with us.

Any thoughts for what’s to come in 2019?

I anticipate 2019 to become the year of fraud prevention, where networks start eradicating suspicious clicks before they turn into suspicious installs or actions. I’d also love to see it be the year of automation and really want to see all industry players collaborating on compliance topics on a more advanced level.

Evgeniia was talking to Glispa’s Content Marketing Manager, Julia Buchterkirchen.