• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, March 28, 2025

Citing a new Adalytics report about ad fraud, Senator Mark Warner (D-Virginia) on Friday urged the federal government to investigate whether verification vendors including DoubleVerify, Integral Ad Science and Human Security misrepresented their ability to detect traffic from bots.

“Research indicates that certain ad verification companies are making apparently false and misleading claims about the capability of their products to avoid bots and ensure paid-for ad content reaches humans,” Warner says in a letter to Federal Trade Commission Chair Andrew Ferguson.

He added that new research from forensics firm Adalytics “shows that major advertisers -- including nonprofits and numerous US federal, state, and municipal government entities -- have had their ads served to bots operating out of data centers rather than authentic human audiences.”

Warner sent a similar letter to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi.

The letters referenced a report by Adalytics, which claimed that DoubleVerify, Integral Ad Science often fail to prevent ads being served to bots.

Adalytics said its research "suggested that advertisers were billed by ad tech vendors for ad impressions served to declared bots operating out of known data center server farms."

Adalytics additionally reported that “thousands” of brands, including Procter & Gamble, Hershey’s and Microsoft, as well as government agencies including the Department of Homeland Security, US Army, US Air Force, US Navy and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “had their ads served by ad tech vendors to bots in data centers" since at least 2020.

DoubleVerify, Integral Ad Science and Human Security haven't yet responded to MediaPost's request for comment.

Warner asked Ferguson to investigate and answer a host of questions by April 28 -- including whether Integral Ad Science, DoubleVerify, Human Security and others were capable of preventing ads from being servied to “declared bots.”

The lawmaker also asked Ferguson about the “extent of the resulting financial harm” to the government, nonprofits and publishers that “paid for this ineffective bot avoidance technology.”

The letter to Bondi asks her to investigate whether Integral Ad Science, DoubleVerify and Human Security “knowingly misrepresented their capabilities” regarding the ability to detect and filter bots, and whether the firms violated the False Claims Act by charging the government for services they didn't deliver.

This isn't the first time Warner has raised concerns about ad fraud with federal authorities. In 2016, the lawmaker, along with Senator Charles Schumer (D-New York), urged former FTC Chair Edith Ramirez to investigate whether online ad fraud was artificially driving up the price of ads.