Arab Daily

AppsFlyer, the Modern Marketing Cloud, has published the State of Fraud for Marketers 2026, revealing that the UAE has seen a significant reduction in overall fraud volume with a simultaneous migration toward channels where detection is weakest, raising fresh concerns for marketers across the GCC.

UAE: Sharp Drop in Volume Masks a Dangerous Migration

The headline numbers for the UAE are encouraging. Fraudulent installs on Android fell 23% year-on-year, from 16.7 million to 12.8 million. On iOS, the decline was steeper still with a 46% drop, from 9.6 million to 5.2 million installs. For marketers who have invested in fraud detection over the past year, these figures represent a measurable return.

The decline, however, was not linear. UAE iOS fraud spiked sharply in Q2 2025 — installs surged to 15.2 million before collapsing in Q3 — with 71% of that peak volume traced to a single technique involving fabricated app store receipts. By Q1 2026, that technique’s share of UAE iOS fraud had fallen to 41%, suggesting the specific operation had been disrupted. The volume drop is real, but it reflects a targeted intervention rather than a structural improvement across the market.

The Global Pattern: Fraud Does Not Disappear, It Moves

The UAE experience reflects a broader global pattern. Drawing on data from 106.4 billion installs across 246,000 apps, AppsFlyer’s research finds that when fraud is tackled in one channel, it migrates to wherever detection is thinnest. The destination it has currently settled in most heavily is the one channel almost no team monitors for fraud: organic traffic.

Organic installs are the benchmark every marketing team uses to judge whether paid activity is working. Globally, organic now accounts for 52% of all fraudulent installs, making it the single largest fraud channel. When that baseline is inflated, every comparison built on top of it is skewed.

“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 Channels Carrying the Most Risk in 2026

Beyond organic, two other channels saw significant increases in fraud rates over the past year. Owned media fraud, covering channels that brands control directly, such as push notifications, email, and in-app messaging, rose 221% year-on-year, from a rate of 3.4% to 11%. Fraud through demand-side platforms (DSPs), the technology used to buy programmatic advertising, rose 59%, from 5.6% to 8.9%. In both cases, the increase reflects the same dynamic: as higher-profile channels came under greater scrutiny, fraud operations migrated to wherever controls were less developed.

Affiliate marketing, which is widely used across the GCC for performance-driven campaigns in sectors from e-commerce to financial services, carries a structurally elevated fraud risk. The gap between fraud rates in affiliate channels and those in self-reporting networks (closed platforms such as major social and search properties that measure their own performance) reached 36 times in Q1 2026, and remained above 30 times in every quarter of the year. Affiliates ran at approximately 40% fraud across all four quarters while self-reporting networks ran at around 1%. That gap reflects how much more room for manipulation exists when there are more intermediaries between an advertiser and the actual traffic source.

“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,” said Sarah Maina, Regional Manager, Middle East & France, at AppsFlyer.