How the Ad Industry Plans to Fight Online Fraud

The online advertising industry is taking another shot at tamping out the fraud that costs it more than $6 billion a year. The four biggest U.S. ad agencies and huge advertising technology companies, such as Google and AOL, announced support on Thursday for a program to certify legitimate publishers and advertisers. The goal is to lock out anyone who fails to live up to their standards, with an industry organization called the Trustworthy Accountability Group, or TAG, holding the keys.

While TAG will be certifying companies that create ads and websites that display them, the most important link in the chain is the ad networks. It’s a reasonable task for an advertiser to assess the quality of a website it is dealing with directly—but that’s not always how things work. Ads are often sold in automated auctions on sprawling networks that, because of their scale and opacity, can serve as traffic laundering operations for criminals. When an advertiser gets ripped off on business done through one of these networks, it’s hard to tell whether the network knew what was going on or should have known.