Digital analytics company DoubleVerify (DV) has identified fraud schemes designed to exploit ads.txt, the industry standard that enables publishers and platforms to declare authorised digital inventory sellers.
The DV Fraud Lab has found more than 100 cases of ads.txt deception since the standard’s launch in May 2017, with a significant increase in recent years as fraudsters manipulate the system to appear legitimate and divert ad spend away from publishers.
“Bad actors are exploiting ads.txt and advertisers often have no idea it’s happening,” said Gilit Saporta, head of the Fraud Lab. “It’s a growing risk that demands more scrutiny from buyers, sellers and vendors.”
DoubleVerify said the scale of this deception is evident in Synthetic Echo, a network of more than 200 AI-generated, ad-supported websites .
Synthetic Echo churns out low-quality AI content and uses deceptive domain names, such as espn24.co.uk, nbcsportz.com, and cbsnewz.com, to mislead programmatic platforms and buyers into mistaking them for mainstream publishers.
According to DV’s analysis, the deception extends to ads.txt files. The Fraud Lab found near-identical ads.txt files replicated across Synthetic Echo sites, exposing how fraudsters scale these schemes by cloning authorised seller lists.
Last year, DV surveyed 1,000 advertising leaders globally and found that over half (54%) believe GenAI significantly harms media quality.
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