The growth of connected TV advertising is yielding sharply higher CTV advertising fraud this holiday season, according to DoubleVerify, a digital media measurement and analytics company.

One fraud scheme in particular has soared -- "LeoTerra" -- which DoubleVerify originally identified in July 2020.

Since the start of the holiday season, DoubleVerify has found that LeoTerra has seen increased activity over 20 times compared to the level of activity in the fourth quarter of 2020 -- falsifying up to 20.5 million unique CTV devices per day. This is also up nearly 40 times more than the average over the last three months.

“The adage holds true, fraud follows the money,” stated Mark Zagorski, DoubleVerify CEO, in a press release.

He adds: “The more in-demand and premium the inventory, the more likely it is to attract bad actors. In addition, while fraud normally peaks in the fourth quarter, we have found the volumes this year are already higher compared with Q4 of 2020.”

In addition, a mobile fraud effort named CelloTerra, uncovered in March 2020, was used on mobile apps to run background ads and falsify CTV traffic. It tripled its number of spoofed CTV devices and fraudulent impressions in the fourth quarter.

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