Bots drive junk through brand funnels using methods including VPNs, data center traffic, scraping, and click fraud.
In the cases of automotive sites for big car brands across hundreds of campaigns analyzed, 37% of all fraud seen on the top site originated from data centers. The weaponization of data center traffic represents a large part in the rise of customer acquisition fraud. Data centers are popular among bot operators because they represent an easy and relatively inexpensive way to hide illegal activity with some services that offer the usage of thousands IP addresses for a few dozens of dollars. Fraudsters route their bots through data centers (proxy services) in order to “change” their IP in an attempt to avoid detection.