The United Arab Emirates recorded a sharp decline in mobile advertising fraud across both iOS and Android platforms over the past year, but fraudsters are increasingly shifting their activities to channels where detection remains limited, according to a new report by AppsFlyer.
The company’s State of Fraud for Marketers 2026 report found that fraudulent installs on Android in the UAE dropped 23 per cent year-on-year, falling from 16.7 million to 12.8 million. On iOS, fraudulent installs declined by 46 per cent, from 9.6 million to 5.2 million.
AppsFlyer said the figures indicate that investments in fraud detection are yielding results for marketers. However, the company warned that the decline masks a migration of fraud activity to less-monitored channels.
The report noted that UAE iOS fraud surged during the second quarter of 2025, reaching 15.2 million installs before dropping sharply in the following quarter. Around 71 per cent of that peak volume was linked to a single fraud method involving fabricated app store receipts.
By the first quarter of 2026, the share of fraud attributed to that technique had fallen to 41 per cent, suggesting that the operation had been disrupted.
Drawing on data from 106.4 billion installs across 246,000 apps worldwide, AppsFlyer found that fraud is increasingly moving into organic traffic, which now accounts for 52 per cent of all fraudulent installs globally.
“There’s a question worth asking: why would a fraudster attack organic traffic, when there’s no direct payout for doing so? The answer is that organic is the benchmark. It’s the number every marketer uses to judge whether a paid campaign is performing. If you can inflate that number, you shift what ‘normal’ looks like, and suddenly, fraudulent paid installs don’t look fraudulent anymore. They look like they’re just keeping pace. Whether that’s intentional or not, it’s the effect. And right now, a lot of marketers are optimising against a benchmark that’s been moved,” said Adam Smart, Global Director of Product, Gaming, at AppsFlyer.
The report also identified significant growth in fraud across owned media channels, including push notifications, email and in-app messaging. Fraud rates in these channels rose 221 per cent year-on-year, from 3.4 per cent to 11 per cent.
Fraud through demand-side platforms (DSPs), which are used for programmatic advertising purchases, increased by 59 per cent, rising from 5.6 per cent to 8.9 per cent.
Affiliate marketing remained one of the highest-risk channels. According to the report, fraud rates in affiliate networks were around 40 per cent throughout 2026, compared with roughly 1 per cent in self-reporting networks such as major social media and search platforms.
The gap between the two reached 36 times in the first quarter of 2026 and remained above 30 times throughout the year.
Sarah Maina, Regional Manager, Middle East & France at AppsFlyer, said marketers should not assume lower fraud volumes mean the problem has been solved.
“Lower fraud volumes are a positive sign, but they are not the same as a cleaner market. In the UAE, as elsewhere, the data shows that fraud has moved into organic baselines, owned media, and channels that were not on the watchlist. For GCC marketers, the priority now is to apply the same scrutiny to the channels they trust as they already apply to the ones they suspect,” she said.
