Diwali 2025: Festive fraud and the bot bazaar

Every Diwali, India’s digital dashboards light up like diyas. Budgets swell, CPMs soar, and marketers toast record reach before anyone’s checked who (or what) was doing the clicking. Behind the glow of festive performance reports lies an open secret: a rising share of that activity isn’t human at all.

According to Priyanka Kulkarni of Aranca, brands are seeing between 25 and 40 percent of their programmatic impressions flagged as fake after audits this season. “Fraud rates typically surge up to 40 percent during festive peaks like Diwali, as impressions rise by 50 percent and click-through rates often double, masking fraudulent behavior behind high volumes,” she said. Even Hindustan Unilever, she noted, recognises that nearly 30 percent of its digital impressions can be invalid traffic. “Raising awareness has driven some budget allocations for verification,” she added, “yet many brands are still silently losing crores.”

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The pattern is predictable. When ad intensity spikes, fraud follows. Azam Shaikh, Vice-President – Ops & Supply at AnyMind Group, called this year’s uptick “a sharp 30–40 percent rise compared to normal activity.” Spoofed clicks, bot-driven impressions, and app-level spoofing all resurface once spending accelerates.

“The rush to scale campaigns during the festive period often means verification checks take a back seat, and that’s when bad traffic sneaks in,” he said. While larger advertisers now treat verification as “non-negotiable,” using tools like HUMAN, DoubleVerify, and IAS, mid-tier brands still absorb the losses quietly.

That false sense of security is easy to buy into when performance numbers look euphoric. Venugopal Nair, Chief Business Officer at Fixderma, pointed out that “any report that looks too good during peak spending often contains a high level of suspicious activity.” He explained that advanced bots now mimic real-human behavior so convincingly they can “drive up clicks and impressions but have zero wallet potential.”

The good news, he added, is that verification tools are getting better, and capable of filtering roughly 20–25 percent of known invalid traffic and blocking the most common fraud schemes. “Relying on these tools is crucial to ensure the majority of your media spend actually reaches human customers.”

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The temptation to chase volume remains strong. Vedavyas Badri, VP of Programmatic at LS Digital, confirmed “a definite rise in invalid traffic this festive season.” As campaigns scale, “inflated impressions and click farms tend to follow.” The encouraging shift, he said, is that many established brands now budget for verification, “while smaller advertisers still get caught up in the chase for numbers and often overlook audience quality.”

During Diwali, he added, “bid volumes and impressions increase rapidly. This seasonal pressure can expose gaps in older detection systems, but newer AI-driven DSP models are far more adaptive.”

LS Digital partners with third-party investigation tech firms to benchmark real-time festive patterns and flag anomalies instantly. “Remaining vigilant throughout the season,” Badri said, “is the only path to preserving profits.”

From the programmatic trenches, Varun Mohan, Chief Commercial Officer – India at MiQ, sees the same pattern repeating every year. “Whenever media intensity spikes, so does fraudulent activity,” he said. Campaigns now start more than a month before Diwali, inflating inventory early and creating more opportunities for spoofed impressions. But the market itself is maturing. “Most advertisers are no longer ignoring it,” he said. “Brands are actively budgeting for verification and building fraud-prevention into their upfront planning.” MiQ’s Festive Shopper Insights Report shows that 43 percent of shoppers plan to spend over ₹20,000 this season and 45 percent are exploring new brands, numbers that make every wasted impression an expensive mistake.

Mohan noted that bid volumes can jump “three to five times normal levels” during Diwali, particularly as Tier II and III markets flood into the mix. “Modern DSPs and verification partners are equipped to manage this scale,” he said. “Tools have evolved from reactive to predictive, which is what’s needed to counter sophisticated techniques that blend real user data with bot activity.” MiQ now combines pre-bid filters with behavioural and contextual intelligence to cut off suspicious traffic at the earliest stage.

Kulkarni agreed that technology is improving, but warned that fraudsters are improving faster. “Sophisticated AI bots now mimic human behavior, generate fake content, and deploy deepfakes to circumvent detection,” she said. The result is an escalating arms race where verification tools must evolve as quickly as the fraud they’re fighting.

The arms race is also expensive. For smaller brands, the choice often boils down to reach versus rigour. Shaikh called this “the gap between ambition and allocation”, aggressive campaign targets with no parallel line item for validation. Nair put it more bluntly: “Without verification, you’re just buying empty calories.”

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For agencies, the burden is cultural as much as technical. Badri observed that festive deadlines compress the time for quality checks. “The industry has evolved a lot,” he said, “but vigilance remains the only sustainable advantage.”

And for brands, the metric obsession itself feeds the problem. The more weight placed on impressions, CTRs, and CPMs, the easier it becomes for bad actors to mimic success. “Ad fraud isn’t a marketing inefficiency,” Shaikh reminded, “it’s a cybersecurity concern.”

That shift in framing might be the first real sign of progress. As more marketers treat clean media as a competitive advantage rather than an added cost, verification is becoming a default rather than a defence. Mohan called it “the new hygiene metric.”

Still, the scale of festive spending guarantees the bots a feast. When India’s digital economy turns incandescent every October, fake traffic rides the same wave of optimism. The tools are catching up, but not fast enough to outpace greed, speed, and spreadsheets lit up in celebration.