Click fraud in telecoms: How MNOs and MVNOs are losing subscribers to bots, paid log-ins, and budget blowouts

Picture this. Your telecom brand runs a Google Ads campaign for a new unlimited data plan. CPCs are climbing. Clicks look healthy. But subscriber sign-ups? Flat.

You dig into the data and discover that a quarter of your "traffic" is competitor bots scraping your pricing pages. Another chunk is your own customers clicking branded ads to log into their accounts. And last Tuesday, when your network went down for 40 minutes, your daily budget was torched in under an hour by existing subscribers searching for outage updates.

None of those clicks brought you a single new subscriber. But you paid for every one of them.

This is the reality of click fraud in the telecom industry. And it is quietly shaping which operators win the subscriber acquisition race and which ones keep funding their competitors' intelligence reports.

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The scale of click fraud in telecom advertising

Telecom is one of the most heavily targeted verticals for invalid traffic. Industry data consistently ranks it alongside finance and legal as a high-risk category. Spider AF's 2025 Ad Fraud White Paper measured ad fraud rates of 11.1% in telecom, while broader analyses suggest that in some cases, over half of telecom ad budgets have been lost to fraud.

The reasons are structural. Telecom brands bid aggressively on high-CPC keywords. Brand terms carry massive search volume. And the always-on nature of the business means there is no quiet period where fraudulent activity slows down.

Across the industry, between 20% and 40% of paid clicks on telecom brand and plan keywords are non-incremental. That means they generate no new subscriber revenue. For a mobile operator spending $200,000 per month on paid search, that could be $40,000 to $80,000 going to clicks that will never convert.

Global ad fraud losses are forecast to reach $172 billion by 2028. For telecom operators working with capped ARPU and rising CPCs, that trajectory makes click fraud prevention software not a nice-to-have but a margin protection tool.

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Where the budget actually goes

The conversation around invalid traffic in telecom has matured significantly. It is no longer just about generic bot clicks. Today, operators face three distinct categories of budget waste, each with different root causes and different fixes.

1. Competitor bots scraping plans and pricing

Competitor and aggregator bots actively target telecom landing pages. They scrape plan details, device bundles, pricing tiers, and promotional offers. In many cases, this bot traffic represents 25% or more of visits to key acquisition pages.

The commercial damage goes beyond wasted clicks. You are effectively paying for competitors to monitor your every move. Each scraped page informs their counter-offers, undercutting your promotions before they gain traction in the market.

Unlike generic bot traffic, telecom scraping is targeted and strategic. These bots focus on pricing intelligence, churn monitoring, and promotion tracking. They rotate IP addresses, mimic human browsing patterns, and are designed to evade standard platform filters.

2. Paid log-ins from existing subscribers

This one catches most telecom marketers off guard. Existing subscribers use paid brand ads as a shortcut to log into their accounts. They search your brand name, click the top result (your paid ad), and navigate straight to the login page.

The behaviour is understandable from a user perspective. But from a budget perspective, it is a direct tax on ARPU.

Paid log-ins can account for 15% to 30% of total paid search spend, particularly on brand and self-service keywords. These users are already your customers. They would reach your site organically if the paid ad were not there. Every click they make on a paid result is a click that generates zero incremental revenue while inflating your acquisition metrics.

This is a problem that Google Ads cannot solve on its own. The platform cannot distinguish between a high-value prospect searching your brand name for the first time and a loyal subscriber checking their bill for the third time this week.

3. Outage-driven spend spikes

When a network goes down, customers immediately search for answers. Traffic to brand terms can spike 2x to 4x within minutes. Google Ads, running on automated bidding, responds by serving ads to this influx of searchers, burning through daily budgets at an alarming rate.

Almost every click during an outage comes from an existing customer looking for status updates or account access. New subscriber acquisition during a service disruption is effectively zero. Yet your budget treats every one of those clicks as if it were a prospective customer.

Manual responses are too slow. By the time a paid media team spots the spike, pauses campaigns, or adjusts bids, thousands of pounds have already been spent. Operators who simply pause ads during outages are not solving the problem either; they are forfeiting visibility entirely, including to genuine prospects who may be evaluating alternatives during the disruption.

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Why the problem is accelerating

Several forces are compounding the damage click fraud does to telecom acquisition budgets right now.

CPCs on telecom brand and acquisition keywords have risen by 10% to 20% year on year. The cost of each wasted click is materially higher than it was even two years ago.

Automated bidding is now the default across most operator accounts. Smart Bidding, Performance Max, and algorithmic campaign management rely on clean conversion signals to function properly. When your data includes bot visits, paid log-ins, and outage traffic, bidding algorithms learn from the wrong intent. They start optimising toward existing users rather than net-new acquisition.

The impact on campaign intelligence is severe. Invalid users tend to view fewer pages and spend a fraction of the time on site that genuine prospects do. Yet these junk sessions still feed into the signals that shape your bidding strategy. This pollution can inflate CPA by 20% or more, and once the models are trained on bad data, it can take weeks of clean signals to recover.

Meanwhile, OTT players and MVNOs have intensified the competitive pressure on subscriber acquisition. Margins are thinner. Growth targets are steeper. Every percentage point of budget efficiency matters.

And the fraud itself is becoming more sophisticated. AI-powered bots now mimic human behaviour, rotate IP addresses, and exploit target-CPA algorithms, making them harder to catch with basic filters. According to the Imperva Bad Bot Report, generative AI has lowered the barrier to entry for bot operators while simultaneously making their attacks more evasive. The report found that simple bot attacks grew from 40% to 45% of all bot traffic in a single year, driven by freely available AI automation tools.

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What a real audit reveals

When TrafficGuard examined an MVNO's PPC traffic over a two-week period, the findings were stark:

• 20% of 40,000 clicks were invalid traffic
• $20,000 of $100,000 in ad spend was lost to invalid traffic
• Half of all invalid traffic came from bots, hosts, and malware
• 20% of invalid traffic came from duplicate clicks
• A single user clicked the same ad 44 times in 12 hours

The biggest takeaway was not the money lost. It was that the marketing team's campaign metrics were fundamentally unreliable. Conversion rates, CPAs, and ROI calculations were all built on data that included a significant layer of non-genuine engagement. Strategic decisions were being made on polluted numbers.

Operators like Singtel, BT Brand, Circles Life, M1, ViewQwest, and Yaqoot have recognised this challenge and deployed click fraud prevention software for telecom to address it.

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How click fraud prevention software works for telecoms

Effective click fraud protection in telecom requires more than standard bot filtering. It demands a solution built around the specific challenges this vertical faces.

Bot and scraper blocking. Real-time identification and blocking of automated traffic before it reaches your landing pages. This stops competitor intelligence gathering at the source and preserves your budget for real prospects.

User-level validation and click capping. Rather than blocking customers entirely, the right approach caps paid behaviour once it exceeds the value that subscriber generates. If a user has already clicked your brand ad twice today, a third paid click is margin erosion, not customer service. Validation tools ensure existing subscribers can still reach your site through organic results while your paid budget stays focused on acquisition.

Outage resilience. Automated surge protection that activates instantly when traffic patterns indicate a service disruption. This absorbs abnormal click volumes in real time without requiring manual intervention or blanket campaign pausing.

Signal correction. By removing invalid traffic before it enters your bidding models, clean optimisation data is restored. Algorithms learn from genuine acquisition intent rather than log-in behaviour, stabilising CPA and improving the accuracy of Performance Max and Smart Bidding campaigns.

Cross-channel coverage. Invalid traffic does not only affect Search. Polluted signals from Search campaigns flow into Meta retargeting audiences, remarketing lists, and broader demand generation. Cleaning your Search data has a compounding effect across every channel in your stack.

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The competitive advantage that hides in plain sight

Telecom operators have invested heavily in anti-fraud systems on the network side for years. SIM box fraud, bypass fraud, and voice fraud are well-understood threats with dedicated teams and budgets. But marketing budget fraud? That still sits in a blind spot for most operators.

The irony is that addressing click fraud in PPC is significantly simpler than combating the constantly evolving threats on telecom networks. The technology exists. The implementation is straightforward. And the ROI is fast and measurable.

Operators that deploy click fraud prevention gain three things their competitors do not have. They get more budget working toward genuine subscriber acquisition. They get cleaner data driving smarter bidding decisions. And they get resilience against the unpredictable events that can blow out a media budget in minutes.

In a market where ARPU is capped but CPC keeps climbing, the operators who control their paid media waste will be the ones who can afford to compete at scale.

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Start with visibility

If you are not sure how much of your telecom PPC budget is going to invalid traffic, start with an audit. TrafficGuard's free PPC audit can show you the scale of the problem within two weeks, with no disruption to your live campaigns.

From there, the path is clear: block what should not be there, cap what exceeds its value, protect your budget during disruptions, and let your bidding algorithms learn from real demand.

Want to see how Telco operators like Zain KSA reclaimed wasted spend and restored acquisition efficiency? Read the full case study.

Or if you are ready to talk specifics, get in touch with our team.

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Frequently Asked Questions

How much ad spend do telecom companies lose to click fraud?

Industry data suggests that between 20% and 40% of paid clicks on telecom brand and plan keywords are non-incremental, meaning they generate no new subscriber revenue. For a mobile operator spending $200,000 per month on paid search, that could translate to $40,000 to $80,000 in wasted budget. The actual figure varies by market, keyword mix, and how aggressively competitors are scraping your campaigns. A free PPC audit is the fastest way to measure your specific exposure.

Why is telecom one of the worst industries for click fraud?

Telecom ticks every box that attracts invalid traffic. High CPCs make each fraudulent click profitable for bad actors. Brand keywords carry enormous search volume, creating a large attack surface. Competitors have a direct financial incentive to scrape your pricing and plans. And the always-on nature of the business means existing subscribers constantly navigate back to your site through paid ads, inflating costs without generating new revenue. The 2025 Imperva Bad Bot Report ranked telecoms and ISPs as the second most targeted industry for automated account takeover attacks.

What are paid log-ins and why do they matter for telecom PPC?

Paid log-ins occur when existing subscribers click on your paid brand ads to access their accounts rather than navigating directly to your site or using organic search results. This behaviour can account for 15% to 30% of total paid search spend on brand and self-service keywords. The problem is that these clicks cost real money but generate zero incremental revenue. Google Ads cannot distinguish between a new prospect and a current customer logging in, so your budget treats both identically. Over time, this also corrupts your bidding algorithms, which start optimising toward returning users instead of net-new acquisition.

Can Google Ads detect click fraud in telecom campaigns?

Google filters basic invalid traffic such as obvious bot clicks and data centre traffic, but its detection has significant blind spots for telecom-specific issues. It cannot identify an existing subscriber using a paid ad to log in. It cannot recognise competitor bots that use residential proxies and mimic human browsing behaviour to scrape your pricing pages. And it cannot automatically protect your budget during outage-driven traffic spikes. Specialised click fraud prevention software is designed to address these gaps with user-level validation, real-time scraper blocking, and automated surge protection.

What happens to my bidding strategy if I don't block invalid traffic?

When invalid clicks from bots, paid log-ins, and outage spikes mix with your genuine conversion data, your automated bidding models learn from the wrong signals. Smart Bidding and Performance Max algorithms start optimising toward low-value returning users rather than high-value new subscribers. This can inflate your CPA by 20% or more. Worse, once your models are trained on polluted data, it can take weeks of clean traffic before bidding performance recovers. Blocking invalid traffic at the source keeps your optimisation signals accurate and your acquisition costs stable.

Does click fraud protection block my existing customers from reaching their accounts?

No. Effective click fraud prevention does not block customers. It caps the number of times an existing subscriber can trigger a paid click for navigation purposes. Once a user's paid click behaviour exceeds the value they generate as a subscriber, further paid clicks are prevented. The customer can still reach your site through organic search, direct navigation, or bookmarks. The goal is to stop paid behaviour from eroding ARPU, not to restrict account access.

How quickly can a telecom operator see results from click fraud prevention?

Most operators see measurable impact within the first two weeks. TrafficGuard's integration takes one day, followed by a two-week audit period that quantifies your invalid traffic exposure and identifies the specific sources of waste. From there, active protection begins immediately. Operators typically see reductions in invalid clicks of 20% or more, with recovered budget automatically redirected toward genuine subscriber acquisition. Zain KSA's case study is a good example of what this looks like in practice.

How do outage-driven traffic spikes waste telecom ad budgets?

When a network experiences a service disruption, existing customers flood search engines looking for status updates and account access. This can cause paid traffic volumes to spike 2x to 4x within minutes. Because most telecom campaigns run on automated bidding, Google Ads serves your paid ads to this surge of searchers and burns through your daily budget at an accelerated rate. Almost none of these clicks come from prospective subscribers. Manual campaign pausing is too slow to prevent the damage, and blanket pausing forfeits visibility to genuine prospects too. Automated surge protection is the only way to absorb these spikes without losing budget or market presence.

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