By Gilit Saporta, DV VP Product, Fraud & Quality, and Anna Gantman, DV Fraud Analyst
Fraudsters are luring mobile users to a network of Made for Advertising/Arbitrage (MFA) websites by promising them the chance to find the perfect girlfriend.
Make that: The chance to fabricate their own fake perfect girlfriend.
In the latest AI-powered operation designed to siphon away media spend, bad actors produce video and static mobile ads featuring AI-generated women in provocative poses and outfits. The ads invite users to click through and customize these synthetic women “in any outfit, or any style or shape.”
The click doesn’t lead to a dream girl, fake or otherwise. Instead, it routes the user to an AI slop site with more links. A click on those links then redirects the user to a page of fake search results with links to more AI slop sites — and legitimate ads intended for placement in legitimate content.
DreamScheme, as we’ve named it, is a particularly exploitative AI slop network operation. In addition to human-looking images, some ads feature suggestive AI-generated depictions of familiar (and copyrighted) animated girls from popular family movies.
It’s all designed to siphon off spend from unprotected advertisers. Unfortunately, basic vetting and standard detection are no longer enough to guard against these networks.
How DV Uncovered This Scheme
In our work protecting advertiser campaigns, DV constantly identifies new and evolving fraudulent tactics. Our investigation of DreamScheme led us to a host site called TopZeno. (We weren’t the first to arrive: There were over 150,000 visits to TopZeno in March alone, according to SimilarWeb.)
Tracing the scheme behind TopZeno, DV uncovered more than a dozen interconnected sites with identical layouts, all running the same monetization model. Together, DreamScheme brings in over two million visits per month, attracting traffic from the United States, the United Kingdom, Brazil, France and beyond.
Why It Matters to Advertisers
DreamScheme poses serious risks to unprotected advertisers whose ads end up funding this low-quality content. MFA sites waste ad dollars on low-intent, arbitraged traffic that doesn’t reflect real consumer interest, driving up acquisition costs and distorting performance metrics. Ads that appear next to low-quality content can dilute brand equity and reduce campaign effectiveness.
It also highlights how fraudsters are harnessing AI to not only generate slop networks, but also to build the ads that lure users to them. The result is a scaled, self-reinforcing system that deceives consumers and defrauds advertisers.
How to Fight Back
To stay ahead of DreamScheme and other MFA networks, advertisers should consider advanced detection that can spot low-quality, AI-generated content in real time.
DV’s AI SlopStopper™ uses real-time analysis to identify and block AI slop. It goes beyond surface-level checks, constantly scanning for the signals that set AI-generated content channels apart from legitimate channels.
Next Steps
Contact a DV representative.
Learn more about DV fraud protections.
Related Topics
Recent Posts
