AppsFlyer, the Modern Marketing Cloud, today released the State of Fraud for Marketers 2026, an analysis of how mobile ad fraud shifted across platforms, verticals, channels, and techniques between Q1 2025 and Q1 2026. Drawing on data from 106.4 billion total installs across 246,000 apps, the report finds that organic traffic now accounts for 52% of all fraudulent installs, making it the single largest fraud channel and the one least likely to be scrutinised.
Organic traffic, the baseline every mobile marketer uses to judge whether paid campaigns are working, is now the single largest channel for ad fraud. When it’s inflated by fraud, every comparison built on top of it is skewed. The report shows exactly how this plays out in practice: as Finance advertisers tightened affiliate measurement, organic’s share of Finance fraud rose from 35% to 46%. Cleaning up one channel didn’t reduce fraud overall, it just pushed it somewhere less scrutinised.
The scale of that distortion is visible across verticals. In Social Media on iOS, Real Users Lift hit 275% in Q2 2025, meaning three in four installs were fake for an entire quarter. Every campaign metric built on that data was measuring an audience that largely didn’t exist.
The broader pattern holds across every channel examined. Owned media fraud rose 221% year over year, from 3.4% to 11%. DSP fraud rose 59%, from 5.6% to 8.9%. As scrutiny tightened in higher-visibility channels, fraud moved to wherever detection was weakest.
“There’s a question worth asking: why would a fraudster attack organic traffic, when there’s no direct payout for doing so? The answer is that organic is the benchmark. It’s the number every marketer uses to judge whether a paid campaign is performing. If you can inflate that number, you shift what ‘normal’ looks like, and suddenly, fraudulent paid installs don’t look fraudulent anymore. They look like they’re just keeping pace. Whether that’s intentional or not, it’s the effect. And right now, a lot of marketers are optimising against a benchmark that’s been moved.” says Adam Smart, Global Director of Product, Gaming at AppsFlyer.
Key findings from the State of Fraud for Marketers 2026
- Affiliate share of fraud rose 35% year over year in the UK, from 42% to 57%. Affiliates and organic together account for 9 in 10 fraudulent installs. The gap between affiliate fraud rates and those of self-reporting networks reached 36x in Q1 2026, holding above 30x every quarter of the year.
- Organic improved over the same period, consistent with the broader pattern of fraud shifting between channels as scrutiny moves.
- iOS store validation fraud in the UK ranged from 46% to 69%.
- Gambling on Android is the only vertical still accelerating, with fraud rates rising from 49% to 59% year over year and peaking at 64% in Q4 2025. Real Users Lift hit 175% in Q4, meaning advertisers were paying for nearly two fake users for every real one acquired.
- Fraud in the Finance vertical on Android has shown no improvement in five consecutive quarters. Real Users Lift has remained locked between 50% and 53% since Q1 2025. Approximately half of what Finance advertisers think they are acquiring on Android does not exist.
- Owned media and DSP fraud are accelerating. Owned media fraud rose 221% year over year; DSP fraud rose 59%. Both reflect the same pattern: as scrutiny increases in higher-visibility channels, fraud moves to wherever detection is weakest.
Methodology
AppsFlyer’s State of Fraud for Marketers 2026 is based on anonymized, aggregated data from 246,000 apps with at least 1,000 installs in the analysis period, covering 106.4 billion total installs and 55.3 billion paid installs from Q1 2025 to Q1 2026 across iOS and Android. All results follow strict volume thresholds to ensure statistical validity.
The full report is available at: https://www.appsflyer.com/resources/reports/state-fraud-marketers-report/