Mobile App

Fake installs

Stop fake installs on mobile app campaigns

Fake installs are the primary fraud type for mobile UA, directly stealing CPI budget, corrupting MMP attribution, and destroying the LTV data your UA strategy depends on.

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Trusted by leading brands worldwide

Fake installs are the most direct form of mobile UA budget theft

Fake installs are the core mechanism of mobile ad fraud. Every fake install triggers a CPI payout, draining budget that should be acquiring real users. Across the industry, 28% of mobile app installs are estimated to be fraudulent. On campaigns without active fraud protection, UA managers are paying for installs from users who do not exist, never will engage with the app, and contribute nothing to revenue. The only beneficiary is the fraud operator collecting the CPI payment.

Fake installs enter attribution data through three main routes. SDK spoofing simulates installs without any device involvement. Device farms generate installs on real hardware. Click injection intercepts organic installs and attributes them to fraudulent sources. Each method produces different signal patterns but the same outcome: your MMP records an install, your CPI model pays out, and your cohort data is contaminated. LTV projections built on cohorts that include fake users will consistently overestimate engagement and revenue, leading to budget decisions that cannot be justified by real outcomes.

How Tapper stops fake installs on Mobile

Three steps from connection to clean data, no engineering required.

Connect Tapper to your MMP and UA campaigns

Tapper integrates with AppsFlyer, Adjust, Kochava, Singular, Branch, and your ad network accounts. Every install event is monitored from the moment of integration.

Fake installs identified across all fraud vectors

SDK spoofing signatures, device farm clusters, click injection patterns, and CTIT anomalies are all analysed simultaneously. No single fraud technique is assessed in isolation.

Your CPI reflects real users and your LTV data is clean

Fake installs are excluded before entering your attribution data. Your reported CPI is anchored to genuine installs and your LTV models reflect actual user behaviour.

Fake installs by the numbers

Data from Tapper's platform analysis and published industry research.

28%

Of mobile installs are fraudulent globally

$10B

Lost to mobile ad fraud in 2023

40%

Of mobile fraud uses SDK spoofing to fake installs

90%

SDK spoofing detection rate achieved by Tapper

Tapper vs MMP Built-in Fraud Protection

See exactly where the gaps are, and why they matter to your bottom line.

Capability

Tapper

MMP Built-in Fraud Protection

SDK spoofing detection

Proprietary behavioural session analysis

Device signal matching only

Click injection detection

Anomalous CTIT and click pattern analysis

Basic CTIT threshold rules

Device farm identification

Device cluster and network analysis

Device ID blacklisting

LTV data protection

Fake installs excluded from cohorts

Fraudulent installs included in LTV models

Success stories

Trusted by industry leaders

See how companies are protecting their ad budgets and improving ROI with Tapper.

“Tapper played a key role in improving the efficiency of Du's performance marketing activity by addressing traffic quality issues within campaigns. Following implementation, Du achieved a 13% reduction in CPA and an 8.6% increase in order rate, demonstrating a clear improvement in conversion quality and overall campaign effectiveness.”

Joseph Elbcherrawy

Client Leadership Director, Mindshare, a WPP Media Brand

“During our Tapper trial for INFINITI, we uncovered low-quality traffic that wasn't visible inside the platforms. Removing it delivered a 14% uplift in conversions and an 11.4% reduction in CPA - a meaningful efficiency gain for INFINITI's 2026 growth plans.”

David Barnes

Data & Technology Lead, Omnicom Group

“With Tapper's protection we were able to identify and block invalid clicks in real time. The impact was immediate as our cost per acquisition dropped by 30% and ROAS improved significantly. More importantly, Tapper gives us the confidence that our campaigns are reaching genuine customers, which makes it truly invaluable.”

Dimitris Bakas

Senior Performance Marketing, Public Group

“We started using Tapper to get better visibility on where our clicks were coming from, and ended up cutting wasted spend by over 12%. The performance uplift was clear, and for the first time, we could trust the numbers we were seeing. It's a total game-changer for campaign integrity.”

Stuart Parkin

Director of Operations, Regit

“Tapper's blocking technology purifies our paid media traffic which roughly equates to a 36x return against its subscription costs. It's certainly one of the easiest-to-implement tools in our entire marketing stack.”

Reno Mindemann

Head of Growth, Kama Capital

“We've been using Tapper for over a year now, and it has become a core part of how we run paid media. Invalid traffic was always something we knew existed but couldn't really act on. Tapper changed that. We're now saving up to $50K per year, and on PureSquare specifically, we saw around a 20% decrease in CPA. Based on these results, we decided to roll it out across other ventures under Disrupt as well.”

Nurkan Kirkan

GTM Consultant / Paid Growth, Disrupt.com

Trusted by leading brands worldwide

Frequently asked questions

Everything you need to know about stopping fake installs on Mobile App.

Tapper provides install-level fraud classification so you can see the exact proportion of installs flagged per campaign, network, and creative. Most UA managers without active fraud protection are surprised to find that 20-40% of installs on some ad networks are fraudulent. Tapper gives you the breakdown by fraud type so you can identify which networks and sources to deprioritise.

Click injection is when a malicious app on the user's device detects when another app is being installed from the Play Store and fires a fraudulent click immediately before the install completes. This ensures the fraudulent source appears as the last touch in the attribution window and claims the CPI payment for an install that was actually organic or driven by a legitimate channel. Tapper identifies the anomalous CTIT patterns that characterise click injection.

Your install counts will fall and your CPI will initially appear higher, because you are now measuring only real users. But your downstream metrics, retention, LTV, ROAS, will improve as your data is no longer diluted by fake users. The installs you counted before were not generating revenue; removing them from your data gives you an accurate picture to make better budget decisions.