BoSacks Speaks Out: Ad Fraud Didn’t Die, It Just Got a Corner Office

Remember the good old days, say, five years ago, when every media conference I attended was a morality play? When ad fraud was the villain du jour, and we all played the role of horrified onlookers clutching our pearls and gasping at tales of click farms, fake humans, and phantom websites? Headlines screamed, whistleblowers testified, and the ad industry swore on its stack of programmatic contracts that it would clean house.

Fast forward to today. The fraud is still here, fatter, slicker, and wearing better shoes, but the outrage has vanished like a Snapchat story. Why? Because somewhere between the scandal and the quarterly earnings call, we made peace with the grift. We didn’t solve it. We domesticated it.

Ad fraud stopped being a crisis and became a line item. The big holding companies’ budget for it the way they budget for kombucha in the break room. Sure, a few million will vanish into the botnet abyss, but the dashboards look good and the KPIs are trending upward, so who’s complaining? Certainly not the platforms, the trillion-dollar walled gardens that now release glossy “transparency reports” celebrating the fraud they blocked, while conveniently ignoring the fraud they missed. These are the same platforms that own the scoreboard, write the rulebook, and still expect a standing ovation. It’s like letting the fox audit the henhouse and then giving him a poultry safety award.

Marketers, once burned and briefly outraged, now buy fraud insurance like it’s a gym membership they’ll never use. They hire verification vendors to rubber-stamp impressions as “clean,” and everyone pretends the problem has been solved. It hasn’t. It’s just been professionally managed, sanitized, and rebranded as a cost of doing business.

Meanwhile, the crooks have upgraded. Gone are the sweaty warehouses of minimum-wage clickers. Today’s fraudsters run sleek, VC-worthy operations that would make Silicon Valley blush. Methbot, a Russian-run operation, spoofed millions of fake video ad views and siphoned off $7 million a month before the FBI finally shut it down. ICEBUCKET impersonated streaming devices to fabricate billions of video ad requests, stealing tens of millions from brand budgets while marketers toasted their “CTV growth.” ParrotTerra and DiCaprio, yes, they named one after Leo, ran domain-spoofing scams that impersonated premium publishers and redirected programmatic dollars into offshore accounts with all the subtlety of a Bond villain.

According to the World Federation of Advertisers, ad fraud could hit $60 billion annually by 2026. That’s not a rounding error. That’s organized crime with a media badge. It’s the most lucrative criminal enterprise after narcotics and arms trafficking. And yet, the industry shrugs.

And magazines? Let’s be honest: our fraud is a flea on the back of a botnet elephant. It exists, but it’s boutique mischief compared to the algorithmic larceny of digital. Yes, I’m sure that some publishers still inflate circulation figures like it’s 1997, hoping advertisers won’t notice the ghost subscribers and duplicated lists. It’s a violation of truth-in-advertising laws, and the FTC occasionally wakes up long enough to wag a finger.

And while we’re at it, let’s pour one out for Verified Audit Circulation, the third-party watchdog that used to keep publishers honest. It went belly-up in 2022, leaving a vacuum where independent verification once lived. Now, we’re back to trusting self-reported numbers, because nothing says “accountability” like grading your own homework.

Then there’s native advertising, the editorial wolf in sponsored sheep’s clothing. Despite labels like “Sponsored Content,” studies show nearly a third of readers still mistake advertorials for actual journalism. And let’s be honest: some publishers count on that confusion. The font matches, the tone mimics, the bylines blur, and suddenly, the line between editorial integrity and paid placement isn’t just fuzzy, it’s willfully erased. It’s not fraud in the methbot sense, no Russian botnets or spoofed devices here, but it’s still a quiet betrayal. A wink-and-nudge deception that tiptoes along the FTC’s blurry line of disclosure, hoping no one’s paying close attention. And increasingly, no one is.

So yes, print has its sins. But in the cathedral of ad fraud, magazines are the choirboys sneaking sips of communion wine while the digital world runs a full-blown Ponzi scheme in the vestry. We’re not innocent, but we’re not the ones building billion-dollar empires on synthetic impressions and algorithmic smoke.

So where did the drama go? It didn’t disappear. It got normalized. Ad fraud didn’t die, it matured, put on a tailored suit, and walked into the boardroom with a smile and a spreadsheet. The real scandal isn’t that the grift persists. It’s that we stopped caring. We stopped asking hard questions. We stopped demanding receipts.

So what now? Do we keep nodding along while the fraudsters invoice us for our own gullibility? Do we let “acceptable loss” become the industry’s new moral compass? Do we keep feeding the machine because it’s easier than fixing it? Or do we remember that media, real media, is supposed to inform, not impersonate? That truth isn’t a metric, and trust isn’t a toggle switch?

If we’re going to survive this era of synthetic impressions and algorithmic sleight of hand, we need more than dashboards and disclaimers. We need backbone. We need scrutiny. We need to stop mistaking managed deception for progress. Because every time we shrug at the grift, we erode the very foundation we claim to stand on.

The longer we treat fraud as a feature, not a bug, the more we become complicit in our own irrelevance. We’re not just losing money, we’re losing credibility, inch by inch, impression by impression. And let’s not pretend we don’t know why the grift persists. It’s not mystery, it’s motive. Fraud continues because too many people are making too much money. The margins are juicy, the incentives are baked in, and the system rewards silence. Greed isn’t a glitch, it’s the operating system. And unlike fraud, greed is incurable.

Sometimes I think about that $60 billion in annual ad fraud, how a portion of it once flowed through the magazines we loved, the ones that told real stories, built communities, and didn’t need to impersonate journalism to sell a page. Imagine if we got even a sliver of that back. Imagine what we could build, restore, or reinvent. I know it’s an impossible dream, a romantic notion in an age of dashboards and deception. But I do think of it from time to time. Because remembering what was possible is the first step toward demanding better.

Wake up, folks. The grift is wearing a tie, sipping cold brew, and it’s already leading the meeting. And unless we start calling it out, loudly, publicly, relentlessly, we’re just the warm bodies in the room, nodding along while the con rolls on.