FT’s email spoofing costs advertisers more than $1.3 million a month

The Financial Times, one of the world's leading business news organizations, provider, has been investigating a potential domain spoofing occurring against its site. The results were ‘jow-dropping’, as described by Anthony Hitchings, the FT’s digital advertising operations director. The fraud scale was huge: 10 separate ad exchanges and video ads on 15 exchanges with 300 accounts were selling ads claimed for FT’s. The domain spoofing was found to cost advertisers around $1.3 million a month, all of which were lost on organized crime instead of being invested in marketing budgets.

The Financial Times mainly adopts direct deals with advertisers, programmatic ads are accounted for 5 percent of its advertising revenue. But other publishers who rely more on programmatic revenue could have an even bigger domain-spoofing problem.

Domain spoofing is one of digital advertising major concerns, and premium publishers are usually the top targets as their inventory is highly priced: it’s when fraudsters whether publishers, ad networks or exchanges hide the nature of their traffic to resemble legitimate websites and serve ads to collect the bids against them.

Source: Digiday