Did bots add chaos to the Black Friday mania?

A flood of non-human activity polluted retargeting pools, brands witnessed impression bursts late at night, unexplained click spikes and inflated session counts that did not correspond with checkouts

by Anuja Jain
Published: Dec 10, 2025 9:27 AM | 7 min read

Black Friday has transformed from a western import into one of India’s most influential ecommerce moments, merging seamlessly with the country’s extended festive and discount season. This year, India recorded the fastest transaction growth worldwide during Black Friday with a 14.6% rise in online purchases according to Criteo. Shoppers transacted more frequently even as average cart values moderated, reflecting a shift toward value conscious digital behaviour. Yet behind this high engagement sat a more troubling reality. Fraud levels surged to six year highs and automated traffic quietly siphoned millions from performance budgets.

This shift was neither subtle nor short lived. Dhiraj Gupta, CTO and Co-founder of mFilterIt, has described this year’s Black Friday cycle as one of the most intense bursts of fraudulent activity the Indian market has seen. He said, “fraud levels on regular days in November hovered between 18-27% but jumped to more than 60% the moment the sale window opened on 20 November and peaked at 70%. He added, “daily clicks surged from the usual 1.5-1.6 million to nearly 20 million during the sale, while installs rose only modestly from around 55-59 thousand to about 70-75 thousand, a clear sign that most incremental traffic was not real consumer demand. Gupta explained that fraudsters left the ecosystem almost as quickly as they entered it, with levels dropping back to 21-27% once the sale ended on 26 November and eventually falling to 18% by month end.

A Season of Bots Rather Than Shoppers

The growing dependence on automation has gradually shifted the nature of Black Friday traffic. Indian brands witnessed impression bursts late at night, unexplained click spikes and inflated session counts that did not correspond with checkouts. Global infrastructure data from Cloudflare reinforces this trend, showing that 31.2% of all application traffic is bot driven. The result is a distortion of campaign signals at a scale that even seasoned marketers struggle to detect until damage is done.

Meher Patel, Founder of Hector, said, “the contamination was visible across every layer of performance marketing.” He explained that automated traffic inflated upper funnel engagement while weakening true conversion efficiency. Patel said the flood of non-human activity polluted retargeting pools, degraded lookalike quality and misled bidding algorithms into scaling low intent inventory. He added, “many brands misinterpreted ROAS compression during peak hours as competitive pressure when in reality the drop came from automated traffic warping attribution logic and optimisation signals.”

Yasin Hamidani, Director at Media Care Brand Solutions, underlined how widespread the mismeasurement has become. He said, “bot driven traffic distorted attribution by inflating clicks and pushing down conversion rates, which led to ROAS being misreported by 20-30% for many brands during Black Friday.” He added, “false signals often forced algorithms to optimize toward junk audiences, diverting budgets into retargeting pools filled with non-human users and corrupting lookalike models trained on tainted data.”

The Red Flags That Defined India’s Fraud Spike

The surge in automation revealed consistent behavioural patterns that separated fake engagement from genuine demand. There were unusual time gaps between clicks and conversions, with conversions occurring either too soon or after improbable delays. Spam traffic mimicked real users but did not lead to installs. Low value transactions rose sharply in discounted categories as fraudsters tested system thresholds. Ad impressions spiked at odd hours when shoppers are usually inactive, indicating continuous automated scripts rather than organic browsing.

These signals created a widening click to conversion gap that analytics teams could not reconcile in real time. India’s app fraud rate, previously recorded at 19.61% by AppsFlyer, supplied an early warning but the intensity of the Black Friday spike exceeded expectations and overwhelmed default safeguards.

The New Normal Is Forensic Marketing

The volume of misleading traffic has forced analytics teams to adopt new investigative practices. Patel noted that post sale reconciliation has become critical, with teams comparing server side logs, SDK event trails, payment confirmations and fraud signatures to distinguish real demand from automation clusters. Brands are now recalibrating customer acquisition costs and lifetime value only after removing suspected non-human activity and aligning festive numbers with stable non sale baselines.

Hamidani added that teams have begun triangulating pixel data, CRM records and server logs to isolate genuine user behaviour. Tools like time of day filters and device fingerprinting have become routine in identifying suspicious bursts. The shift away from platform reported clicks and toward verified first party event data is becoming a defining feature of attribution in India’s high volume sale windows.

Safeguards Are Not Enough The Market Needs a Strategic Reset

The Black Friday episode has exposed structural gaps in India’s fraud readiness. Existing protections are not built to withstand short duration, high velocity attacks. Gupta described how fraudsters operated at scale for six consecutive days without being flagged early, which left brands exposed during the costliest and most competitive period of the year.

This vulnerability is pushing agencies to recommend deeper structural corrections ahead of the next festive cycle. Patel said brands need to shift from unrestricted algorithmic scaling and instead adopt controlled demand throttling that responds only to verified conversion throughput. Budgets are being restructured into discovery, retargeting and loyalty layers, with tighter placement exclusions and delivery caps based on historical bot density patterns.

Hamidani said pre-sale traffic audits and AI based anomaly detection must become standard practice. He explained that campaigns will move toward engagement based KPIs such as scroll depth, session duration or OTP verified leads. He added that joint post campaign forensic audits with media partners will likely become contractual rather than voluntary, ensuring that every Black Friday and festive cycle ends with a transparent bot exposure report.

Real Time Fraud Prevention Is Now Business Critical

India’s digital advertising ecosystem is expanding rapidly, with GroupM projecting that digital will soon account for nearly 60% of the country’s total ad revenue. With this expansion comes growing exposure to automated manipulation. Patel said brands will need to invest in real time fraud intelligence stacks that combine machine learning driven anomaly detection, server side conversion validation, telecom level traffic provenance and cross platform identity correlation. He explained that these systems are designed to suppress automated demand before it distorts bidding or attribution.

Hamidani said agencies are developing predictive anomaly engines and real time dashboards that can flag suspicious activity within hours instead of after campaigns end. He added that machine learning models that benchmark historical traffic and detect outliers dynamically will become central to fraud prevention.

Adjust data shows that 30% of global ad fraud losses now stem from mobile environments, making India’s mobile first market highly vulnerable without proactive controls. This heightens the need for predictive bot signature modelling and network level invalid traffic suppression as core infrastructure for the next two years.

The Future of Black Friday in India Depends on Fraud Control

Black Friday has evolved into a powerful commercial driver for India, supported by a generation of highly digital, discovery oriented and value focused shoppers. The opportunity is real. The risk is equally real. As long as automated traffic infiltrates digital channels at the scale observed this year, brands will continue to lose revenue to artificial signals, distorted attribution and misdirected optimisation.

The patterns emerging from this year’s Black Friday activity point to a clear structural challenge for India’s digital commerce landscape. Fraud networks tend to enter rapidly, scale at high velocity and withdraw as soon as discount intensity tapers off. This behaviour corrodes bidding efficiency, contaminates audience intelligence and weakens the reliability of performance measurement across the funnel. The consistent distortion of attribution signals and campaign data underscores a broader need for stronger real time defences and more resilient digital infrastructure. India’s festive and discount season will increasingly depend on how effectively the industry adapts to these risks and fortifies its systems against automated manipulation.

Black Friday is no longer just a sale. It has become a test of whether brands can outpace automated fraud. The answer in 2025 and 2026 will determine the true value of India’s biggest discount season.