Singular releases breakthrough deterministic Android Install Validation for mobile app install fraud prevention

New first-in-industry technology detects far more fraud than existing solutions, saving customers millions of dollars annually.

San Francisco — August 21, 2019
Mobile marketing is a high-stakes game of cyber warfare, and the fraudsters are winning.

Advertisers will lose as much as $42 billion in 2019 to digital ad fraud, according to Juniper Research. To fight back, Singular has built a team of cyber-security experts with roots in Unit 8200, the elite Israeli intelligence division that has been called “the foremost technical intelligence agency in the world.”

Today Singular is unveiling the team’s latest breakthrough: first-in-industry Android Install Validation that is deterministically identifying fake app installs. This is a whole new level of fraud prevention unlike anything else on the market, and is vastly more effective than any competing fraud prevention solution. New customers testing it are commonly finding over 80% fraud in paid mobile app install campaigns.

The result is literally millions of saved marketing dollars, according to customers.

“Spending resources on fraudulent traffic is something Glu is actively working to prevent,” says John Parides, Senior Director of User Acquisition at Glu, maker of the iconic Deer Hunter as well as Kim Kardashian: Hollywood, WWE Universe, Tap Sports Baseball, and its latest hit, Diner Dash Adventures. “Singular’s new fraud-fighting technology helps our User Acquisition team focus on legitimate campaigns and significantly boost return on ad spend.”

“Singular’s updated Fraud Prevention suite is the most powerful mobile app install fraud prevention I’ve seen,” says Channy Lim, Head of BI Department at Com2uS, maker of the hit mobile game Summoners War. “This will save us literally hundreds of thousands of dollars every month, and lead us to make more effective marketing decisions.”

Most standard fraud detection is probabilistic: essentially a guess with varying degrees of certainty. It cannot be too aggressive, because that increases error rates. The resulting false positives (and false negatives) waste marketers’ time and money, especially because fraudsters have learned to defeat most probabilistic models. Deterministic methods are harder to find, but when discovered, they are vastly better and can be as aggressive as necessary because they introduce no false positives.

And that changes the playing field. Singular’s cyber-security team used our unique scale to uncover new signals which can deterministically identify whether a Google Play app install is genuine or fake. This new technology is the first that can tell for certain which installs are valid: real device, real user, actual intent. In addition, the team reverse-engineered how fraudsters work and how they defeat probabilistic technologies, then built new tools to help marketers fight back.

Mobile marketing professionals are impressed:

“Singular’s new progressive anti-fraud solution detected more ad fraud than competing solutions,” says Ronak Jain, Mobile Marketing Manager at Cleartrip, the top travel technology platform for emerging markets. “This is a game-changer and will play a key role in making growth decisions.”

Along with Android Install Validation, Singular is also releasing updated solutions to combat click injection and organic poaching, methods for fraudsters to steal credit for installs that ad networks legitimately caused, or were organic, natural customer behavior.

With the powerful and updated Singular Fraud Prevention suite, marketers are revealing that upwards of 80% of paid mobile app installs from some ad networks can be fake, and that some ad networks are close to 100% fraudulent. By identifying fraud before attributing installs, marketers are saving money, getting better data on which to make budget allocation decisions, and wasting far less effort on time-consuming and onerous refund reconciliation efforts with ad networks.

“Our mission is to help companies grow faster and smarter by using data. If your data isn’t clean, or is riddled with fraud, you are paralyzed and can’t make any decisions,” says Singular CEO Gadi Eliashiv. “This breakthrough technology is the result of continuous investment Singular makes in hiring the best talent in the world for the task of fighting against marketing fraud.”

For more details, interviews, exclusive data, or off-the-record background, contact Singular or email press@singular.net.

You can also register for our webinar on September 12th @ 10 am PT where we’ll dive into what Android Install Validation is, how it works and why marketers need it to fight fraud. Or, see the entire Singular Fraud Prevention toolkit, which now includes Android Install Validation.

In addition, check out our latest data-driven fraud report on The Death of Install Fraud on Android

About Singular
Singular is a Marketing Intelligence Platform that transforms marketing data into accurate, granular and actionable insights to drive growth. By unifying marketing campaign data with attribution data, marketers can measure ROI from every touchpoint across multiple channels for a single source of truth. Singular currently tracks over $10 billion in digital marketing spend to revenue and lifetime value across industries including retail, finance, travel, gaming, entertainment, media, and on-demand services. Singular customers include companies like Lyft, Yelp, Airbnb, LinkedIn, Symantec, Zynga, Match, and Twitter. Singular is backed by Norwest Venture Partners, General Catalyst, Thomvest Ventures, Method Capital, Translink Capital, DCM, and Telstra Ventures.