In this episode of The Saturday Fraud Strategist, I talk with Gilit Saporta about ad tech in financial fraud, which sounds very niche until you realize it touches malware, fake traffic, bot detection, consumer abuse, advertising fraud, and a lot of systems quietly pretending they have this handled.
Ad tech fraud is not just “someone clicked a fake ad.” That would almost be simple. What we’re really talking about is a whole ecosystem where fraudsters monetize traffic, hijack devices, manipulate advertising spend, and sometimes pull regular people into the mess without them even knowing it happened.
Gilit brings nearly two decades of fraud-fighting experience across financial services, crypto, e-commerce, and digital advertising, so the conversation gets practical pretty quickly. We look at what makes ad tech in financial fraud different from traditional fraud, where fraud detection is improving, and where systems still fall apart because the context is missing.
And honestly, that’s the part that keeps coming up.
You can have AI fraud prevention. You can have automated fraud detection. You can have dashboards that look very impressive in a board meeting. But if the system can’t tell the difference between a weird but legitimate pattern and an actual fraud signal, now you’ve got a problem. Maybe a very expensive problem.
What you’ll hear in this episode:
- A step-by-step breakdown of how ad tech fraud works and why it does not behave like traditional financial fraud
- A practical look at what modern fraud detection is getting right and where it still struggles
- Why institutions, platforms, and technology teams need to stop treating fraud risk management as someone else’s cleanup job
- A conversation about AI-powered fraud fighting, automation, accountability, and the uncomfortable gap between speed and judgment
- How consumers get pulled into device hijacking, malware, scams, fake apps, and fraudulent advertising ecosystems
- Why better financial fraud prevention depends on context, not just bigger models or faster alerts
- A discussion about collaboration between fraud teams, trust and safety, researchers, regulators, and the organizations sitting on all the useful data
Who should listen:
- Fraud professionals and financial institution leaders
- Risk, compliance, and cybersecurity teams
- AI, machine learning, and fraud analytics practitioners
- Trust and safety teams
- Ad tech, e-commerce, and digital platform leaders
- Regulators, policy advisors, and industry advocates
- Anyone trying to understand why fraud keeps finding the cracks between systems
This episode is for people who care about fraud prevention strategies beyond the press release version. Detection matters. Compliance matters. But you’ve got to ask yourself, are we actually preventing harm, or are we just getting better at labeling it after the fact?
