Happy Thursday, marketers! Before Memorial Day weekend kicks off, we wanted to share a few interesting highlights from the week all focused on ad fraud.

Ad Fraud Will Actually Go Down in 2017, From $7.2 Billion to $6.5 Billion

According to AdExchanger, the global monetary impact of ad fraud is expected to go down this year, the amount of mobile fraud happening in the ecosystem is much lower than feared and programmatic can be just as safe as direct-sold if buyers implement the right security measures. The bearers of these good tidings are the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) and bot detection outfit White Ops in their third annual joint study on the state of digital ad fraud, released Wednesday.

What the Industry’s New Plan to Fight Ad Fraud Gets Wrong–and Right

Nobody really knows how much is lost to ad fraud each year, but many agree that the number is in the billions. As reported in AdAge, the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Tech Lab recently released a blueprint of sorts that, in theory, would prevent another Methbot from happening. Methbot, of course, is the ad fraud attack from late last year that has been crowned by some as the biggest in history. (Others disagree.) The IAB’s effort, blandly dubbed “ads.txt,” has been applauded by both publishers and ad tech vendors as a step in the right direction in the fight against ad fraud. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it will succeed.

Study Shows 3% of Sources Cause 68% of Ad Fraud

According to Media Post, Fraudlogix, which monitors ad traffic for sell-side companies, found that 68.2% of fake impressions came from 3.2% of publishers. The findings reveal that high fraud percentages don’t represent the industry as a whole and that ad fraud isn’t evenly distributed. And sources that generated the highest percentage of fraudulent impressions contributed a disproportionately high number of impressions to the RTB market.