PropellerAds’ analysis of 20,790 campaigns blocked in Q2 2026 shows that ad fraud is shaped by local traffic economics: high-payout markets attract sophisticated attacks, while lower-cost markets enable fraud at scale. With global ad fraud losses projected to reach $170 billion by 2028, understanding these regional models is becoming essential for campaign planning.
Limassol, Cyprus, August 3 2026 — PropellerAds, a leading global advertising network, released the Q2 2026 edition of its Ads Safety Report, and the headline finding reframes how the industry should think about fraud: there is no single global “fraud profile.” Instead, the type of fraud a market attracts tracks almost precisely with what that market pays for traffic. The analysis draws on the moderation of more than 15 billion ad impressions daily across 190+ markets.
The timing matters. Juniper Research projects global digital ad-fraud losses will exceed $170 billion by 2028, up from $84 billion in 2023, and roughly one in five ad impressions worldwide is now invalid (Fraudlogix put the 2025 global invalid-traffic rate at 20.6%). Against that backdrop, treating fraud as one uniform threat is exactly what lets it through – because the same defence that stops a cheap, high-volume attack misses an expensive, infrastructure-heavy one.
“Fraud operators respond to the same market incentives as legitimate advertisers,” said Julia Larionova, Head of Marketing at PropellerAds. “Payouts, traffic costs, scale, and conversion potential all shape the kind of infrastructure they’re willing to build. In high-payout markets, that means expensive, custom-built cloaking and multi-hop redirect chains. In cheap, high-volume markets, it means mass-distributed malware and messenger phishing built for scale. Once you see fraud as economics, you can predict which threats show up where.”
That regional split sits on top of a bigger shift PropellerAds flagged this quarter: fraud is moving from content to infrastructure. Malware and antivirus-flagged threats jumped from 23.3% to 45.9% of all rejected campaigns between Q1 and Q2 2026, nearly doubling in a single quarter and overtaking adult content as the top rejection reason for the first time. External data points the same way: GeoEdge recorded redirect-based attacks rising from 48% to 66% of malicious ads in 2025, and The Media Trust reported malvertising incidents up 42% year over year, the largest surge since 2019.
The practical takeaway for the industry is that global moderation policy has to become regional. In high-payout markets, PropellerAds points to redirect-chain analysis, post-launch monitoring, and repeated verification as the priorities. In high-volume markets, scalable detection that can identify large numbers of cheap, rapidly replaced campaigns matters more. A one-size-fits-all rulebook, the data suggests, is now a liability.
“The mistake is treating fraud as a single wave you can block with a single wall,” Larionova added. “It’s not one wave – it’s a tide that behaves differently on every shore. Read the local economics, and you stop being surprised.”
ABOUT PROPELLERADS
PropellerAds is a global multisource advertising platform founded in 2011, serving media buyers, agencies, and affiliate marketers across more than 195 countries and regions. The platform offers ad formats including push notifications, onclick (popunder), Telegram Ads, interactive ads, and paid social traffic, with AI-based optimisation tools including CPA Goal bidding. PropellerAds is a member of IAB Europe and holds ISO/IEC 27001 certification.
