Top Fraud Mitigation Strategies for 2026

Why Fraud Mitigation Matters

Fraud isn’t slowing down; in fact, it’s accelerating. In 2026, businesses face a landscape where fraud is smarter, faster, and more automated than ever. While companies continue adopting AI, automation, and digital-first operations, fraudsters are doing the same, often evolving faster.

According to PwC’s 2024 Global Economic Crime and Fraud survey, almost 53% of organizations experienced fraud in the last 24 months, with cyber-enabled fraud seeing the fastest growth.

Fraud mitigation is no longer optional; it’s a strategic necessity for every business, regardless of size or industry.

As fraud grows more complex, so do the solutions. Protecting your organization now requires not only blocking attacks but validating every interaction to ensure you’re operating on clean, trustworthy data.

Understanding Fraud Mitigation

So, what is fraud mitigation?

Fraud mitigation refers to the processes, systems, and tools businesses use to detect, prevent, and minimize fraud-related losses. While “fraud prevention” focuses on stopping attacks outright, “fraud mitigation” acknowledges the reality that some threats will get close, but strong systems will detect, isolate, and stop them before harm can occur.

In 2026, fraud mitigation strategies need to address:

• Digital fraud: bots, malware, automated attacks, fake accounts
• Human-driven fraud: organized fraud farms, account takeovers, affiliate fraud
• Financial fraud: payment fraud, invoice manipulation
• Operational fraud: internal misuse, unauthorized access

And these strategies have to operate in real time. Businesses need layered defenses that can examine environmental patterns, validate digital traffic, authenticate identities, and continually adapt to new threats.

The Cost of Inaction: What Happens Without Effective Mitigation

Ignoring fraud or relying on outdated tools is expensive. Here’s what businesses face without strong mitigation strategies in place:

• Revenue Loss: Fraud directly pulls money out of your business. Whether it’s wasted ad spend, chargebacks, payment fraud, or fake leads, the losses add up fast. On average, based on our data 25% of ad spend is siphoned off by fraud, making campaigns appear strong with high metrics, when in reality, they deliver minimal real value.
• Corrupted Analytics and Poor Decision-Making: Fake clicks and impressions distort engagement and conversion data. Your attribution models, ROAS calculations, and targeting adjustments may all be based on invalid traffic, leading to poor decisions, wasted budget, and missed opportunities.
• Increased Operational Costs: Without automation, teams spend hours manually investigating suspicious clicks and leads, processing chargebacks, and cleaning data. This is both expensive and inefficient.
• Poor Brand Reputation and Lack of Trust: Fraud can degrade customer experiences through fake leads, spam, or misattributed targeting, thus damaging trust and making future acquisitions harder and costlier.
• Regulatory and Compliance Consequences: As governments introduce stricter data protection and AI governance laws, organizations that fail to mitigate fraud risk may face substantial fines or legal exposure.

Fraud isn’t just a cost center; it’s a risk that threatens growth, customer loyalty, and competitive advantage.

The Top Fraud Mitigation Strategies for 2026

Fraud is more sophisticated, more automated, and more financially damaging than ever before. That’s why businesses should rely on fraud mitigation strategies that go beyond surface-level checks or outdated tools. Below are five strategies every organization should focus on to effectively mitigate fraud in the year ahead.

1. Implement a Dedicated Fraud Mitigation Solution

   Using a specialized fraud mitigation solution, like Anura’s ad fraud solution, has become essential for stopping invalid traffic like bots, malware-driven traffic, and organized human fraud. Real-time detection protects your marketing campaigns, ensures only genuine users engage with your assets, and provides clean data you can trust.

2. Strengthen Supply Chain Oversight

   Modern digital advertising runs through layered supply chains, with publishers, resellers, ad exchanges, and intermediaries involved before an ad reaches the end user. To protect your campaigns, it’s critical to vet supply-path partners, demand transparency in inventory sourcing, and use supply-chain verification tools or audits to confirm quality. By treating supply-path integrity as a core control, you reduce the risk that hidden intermediaries will drain your ad spend.

3. Layer Real-Time Verification and Multi-Step Validation

   Single-step fraud checks can’t keep up with today’s rotating IPs, spoofed devices, and automated human-like behavior. A study on ad-fraud detection techniques demonstrated that multi-layered verification (i.e., combining anomaly detection, environmental analysis, and machine learning classification) significantly improves detection accuracy while keeping false positives low. To stay ahead, businesses need real-time, multi-step validation across the user journey: traffic screening at entry, device and session verification during engagement, and conversion-time checks before recording any action. Layering these steps closes gaps fraudsters exploit while keeping users moving smoothly.

4. Apply Adaptive Risk Scoring and Ongoing Traffic Monitoring

   Risk isn’t static. Fraudsters change tactics constantly. That’s why one-time validation isn’t enough. A cross-industry study found that when organizations enforce ongoing anti-fraud standards, including monitoring, audits, and traffic quality checks, they significantly reduce invalid traffic losses and recover billions in ad spend. Adaptive risk-scoring means continuously evaluating traffic across multiple signals and flagging anomalies when patterns shift. By treating traffic as a living, evolving landscape rather than a one-time checklist, you build resilience and stay ahead of emerging threats.

5. Maintain Internal Controls, Transparency, and Clear Accountability

   Fraud isn’t always external. Sometimes, internal misconfigurations, weak processes, or collusion enable ad fraud or misuse. That’s why it’s vital to embed strong internal controls: segregation of duties (so no single individual handles entire financial or ad workflows), dual approvals for payments or budget changes, transparent audit trails, and periodic internal and external audits. Studies consistently find that weak internal controls are among the top causes of fraud incidents.

By combining internal controls with external verification, businesses build a comprehensive fraud risk mitigation framework across technical, financial, and operational layers.

Fraud Mitigation Best Practices for Every Business

No matter the industry or size, every organization can strengthen its fraud defenses with these foundational practices:

• Adopt a layered security approach. Use multiple tools, checks, and verifications instead of relying on a single solution.
• Prioritize real-time detection over reactive review. Threats move fast; mitigation has to be immediate.
• Keep data clean and validated at the source. Prevent fraud from corrupting downstream systems.
• Make employee training ongoing, not one-and-done. Humans are often the first or last line of defense.

These aren’t optional; they are foundational to any resilient, long-term ad strategy.

How Anura Helps Businesses Mitigate Fraud

As fraud grows more advanced, businesses need a fraud solution that delivers accuracy, transparency, and real-time protection without harming legitimate customers.

At Anura, we believe fraud mitigation isn’t a one-size-fits-all. That’s why our ad fraud solution delivers:

• Real-time detection of bot traffic, IVT, and fraudulent clicks or leads. Anura identifies fraudulent interactions the moment they occur, preventing wasted ad spend before it impacts campaigns.
• Transparent reporting and analytics. You’ll see exactly which interactions are genuine and which are fraudulent, empowering your marketing team to make data-driven decisions.
• Campaign protection and attribution integrity. Every conversion is verified, so your ROI and attribution models reflect real human activity, not bots or invalid traffic.
• Scalable protection. Anura’s solution grows with your business, whether you’re running a single campaign or managing global ad spend across multiple channels. Our 99.999% Accuracy Guarantee ensures that legitimate users are never blocked, while fraud is stopped in its tracks. This means you can scale confidently without worrying that new campaigns or channels introduce hidden risks.

Experience the Power of Accurate Fraud Mitigation

Fraud in 2026 is more adaptive, automated, and dangerous than ever. But with the right fraud mitigation strategies and the right tools, businesses can stay ahead of the threats.

If you want to see what’s really happening across your digital traffic, now is the time to act. Experience the power of Anura and discover just how much fraud you have with a 15-day free trial.