Episode
The $140 Billion Ad Fraud Problem Nobody Wants to Fix | Rich Kahn, Anura | The ADOTAT Show
- Podcast
- Marketing, Media & Adtech
- Published
- Apr 5, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 2204
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://adotat.captivate.fm
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Summary
Rich Kahn, CEO of Anura and one of the digital advertising industry's most uncompromising voices on ad fraud, joins Pesach Lattin on The ADOTAT Show for a conversation that should be required watching for every media buyer, brand marketer, programmatic trader, and ad tech executive who has ever looked at a campaign dashboard and assumed the numbers were real. They are not. At least not half of them. In this episode, Rich Kahn breaks down the $140 billion annual ad fraud problem that the programmatic advertising ecosystem has systematically chosen to ignore, explains why the pre-bid filtering your DSP is selling you catches roughly one to three percent of actual invalid traffic, and describes in detail the AI-assisted bot attack that defeated every IVT vendor in the market simultaneously, including his own company, for two months in 2024. He also walks through what happened on the floor of Affiliate World Bangkok, where fraudulent traffic certified to defeat all fraud detection systems was being sold openly at convention booths like any other media product. This is not a theoretical conversation. This is twenty years of data, delivered by the person who has been running it. But this episode is also something else entirely. Rich Kahn grew up on welfare, got married at 21, bought his first house at 23, turned down an invitation to the 2000 Olympics because he had just started a job and couldn't afford to leave, watched a $60 million acquisition offer evaporate two weeks before closing when the dot-com bubble burst, and has bootstrapped every single company he has ever built because venture capital was never an option and the mortgage was always real. He is one of the most honest and specific people we have ever had on this show about what entrepreneurship actually looks l…