Companies That Worked With The Apps/Sites In Some Way

	A	B	C	D	E
1	Name	Status	Initial Comment	Follow Up Comment	Dollar amount identified
2	AdColony		"Fraud is a very serious matter and we take a proactive approach to monitor for malicious publisher behavior before it impacts our advertising partners. We utilize a diligent human-level review process combined with automated systems when on-boarding new publishers. While a significant portion of in-app monetization has shifted to a programmatic mindset, we believe there is still significant value to having a trained human eye on things. We closely monitor and review publisher reports on a daily basis to look for irregularities and suspicious behavior. If there is a cause for concern, we have a process in place to initiate an immediate discussion with the publisher and take proper action when required. For this particular matter, we had already investigated and found that our own internal efforts to review publishers and user behavior has mitigated risk and minimized exposure to this issue for our advertisers." -- Matt Barash, Head of Strategy and Business Development, AdColony	"We're not going to disclose specific numbers, but it was extremely low thanks to our publisher on-boarding and fraud detection processes." — Spokesperson
3	Adtelligent/VertaMedia		"As soon as we got your email, we made our internal investigation, and as a result, we see an insufficient amount of Impression served through our platform. But we found that our system block more than 11 billion ad calls that was made for the past six months through our platform automatically with the help of our verification partner Protected Media. Regarding further actions, we asked our brand safety team to check traffic sources and advertisers that was involved in this scheme. At the current moment, the total amount of revenue generated by this traffic sources was about $10,000, and we are going to contact our partners from both sides (publishers and advertisers) to ask for clawbacks and provide a discount or for our service. Let me know if you have any other questions that might help you with this case."		"About $10,000"
4	AOL/Oath		“Oath has a strict policy against ad fraud, and is committed to providing a trusted digital experience backed by our proprietary technology, industry-leading third party measurement and human reviews. We're investigating these claims and will remove any app inventory that violates our policies."	“We have seen an impact of under $300,000 in the last 90 days. We are removing the inventory from our platforms and evaluating affected buyers for refunds.”	"Under $300,000"
5	AppLovin		"Our platform is designed to filter out fraud upon detection. We investigated this matter and can confirm our fraud prevention measures worked as designed."
6	AppNexus		"Based on our preliminary analysis, the domains and apps associated with this scheme impacted an immaterially small and fractional portion of daily platform spend on the AppNexus platform. We’ve taken action to block those that were not already banned from our marketplace."
7	Appodeal	Emailed	"While most publishers stay straight and narrow, we are aware that some of them do attempt to unfairly game the system to come out on top. This is why Appodeal runs a comprehensive testing system to detect and block fraudulent activities at a moment’s notice. Every application at Appodeal goes through multiple rounds of manual and automated checks. Plus, we cooperate closely with our ad network partners to detect and ban any abnormal activities. We have zero tolerance for fraud. Any signs of fraudulent activities result in the banning of the app, including the one mentioned on your list."
8	BidSwitch	Emailed	"This discovery highlights the ongoing threat of ad fraud to our industry and reinforces the need for all players involved to work together to identify and stop bad actors. While BidSwitch has had unique, sophisticated fraud detection tools and filtering mechanisms in place since 2014, we are constantly refining our technology and enforcement practices as new tactics emerge and evolve. In response to this issue, we've blocked all traffic originating from the named sources until further notice. We will be proactively engaging with all our affected partners to understand the impact of such activity to their business, and mitigate accordingly from our unique position in the ecosystem. Please let us know if you have any further questions or would like more information." — Barry Adams, GM of BidSwitch
9	Chartboost		"Our Fraud team did read your article yesterday they are looking into the specific cases. We believe the adtech industry should be more open and transparent; data and research like yours is extremely useful for companies like us that have 0 tolerance for fraud." CEO Pepe Agell	"I'm aware that it may too late but I wanted to let you know that based on a preliminary analysis, our fraud team has told me that the impact of these fraudulent apps has been minimal, in the low thousands in the course of 3 years. The reason is that they were flagged (and shut down) by our fraud mitigation algorithms and therefore, the affected traffic was insignificant." — CEO Pepe Agell
10	Facebook Audience Network		“We take the integrity of our Audience Network ecosystem very seriously. Audience Network is governed by policies to preserve its integrity, and we have mechanisms in place to prevent abuse and remove publishers from monetizing if they're found in violation. We're actively investigating this issue and to date, we've found an extremely small impact to Facebook Audience Network.”
11	FreeWheel (Owned by Comcast)	Emailed
12	Google/AdMob/AdSense	Posted publicly on blog	https://security.googleblog.com/2018/10/google-tackles-new-ad-fraud-scheme.html	NA	close to $10 million
13	HeyZap/Fyber/Inneractive		“We received traffic from 8 of the 130 apps on the list in 2018. These apps were shut down months ago as soon as they were identified by our internal systems as fraudulent and as a consequence we no longer work with any of them. At Fyber, we ensure the highest level of quality for traffic going through our platform in order to safeguard our advertisers from ad fraud. Our ‘Keeping it Clean’ initiative includes consistent application of new technologies to verify, authenticate and protect our ad traffic. Additionally, Fyber has strong partnerships in place with anti-fraud third parties to monitor the quality of our supply chain in its entirety.”
14	Improve Digital	Emailed
15	Index Exchange	Emailed
16	InMobi/Aerserv		"InMobi is committed to providing best practice anti-fraud techniques to protect our publishers, advertisers and users of our services. At InMobi, we implement a number of global standards and practices to eliminate fraud. InMobi is leading the charge on driving accountability in advertising by instrumenting proactive checks for fraud prevention and detection across all stages of the impression value chain."
17	Maple Team	Emailed
18	Matomy/MobFox		"While we will not comment on the specific event, due to confidentiality agreements with our partners, please understand that we take the prevention and elimination of ad fraud very seriously. Working together with our partners MOAT and Pixalate and using our own sophisticated in-house tools, we actively prevent, identify and block suspicious activity. As recently announced, Mobfox has received top rankings in the Mobile Seller Trust Index, reflecting our commitment to transparency and quality in programmatic advertising."
19	Mediashakers	Emailed
20	MoPub	Emailed
21	Nexstar Media Group/LKQD	Emailed
22	OpenX	Emailed
23	PubMatic		"At PubMatic, we believe that quality is critical to the continued success of our industry. As a policy, we leverage trust score analysis, multiple third-party tech providers, and proprietary in-house resources to monitor our inventory quality. We also understand that fraudsters continue to evolve new ways to deceive the ecosystem, and as such implemented a fraud free program last year, so if fraud is detected, buyers do not need to pay for it. We have investigated the apps and publishers uncovered by the BuzzFeed investigation and were pleased that buyers’ exposure to this inventory was mitigated pursuant to PubMatic standard practices. Less than $25 thousand of spend was identified on the PubMatic platform and, as per our policy, these are subject to refunds to the impacted buyers. All domains and apps are blocked from monetization." Spend is July 1 through October 24 of 2018.		Less than $25,000
24	PulsePoint	Sent follow ups	We take all reports of questionable activity seriously, and when we find invalid traffic, we act quickly to remove it from our systems. In addition to our internal human and machine filters, and blacklists, we work closely with our partners, third-party vendors, DoubleVerify, IAS, and Pixalate.
25	Smaato	Emailed	"I heard back from Smaato and they said that due to contractual reasons with their partners, they aren't able to participate." — PR rep
26	SmartRTB+	Emailed
27	SnW Media	Emailed
28	SpotX		"The impact to SpotX is negligible. SpotX has never worked with any of the companies listed in the article and has several processes and technologies in place to avoid this type of behavior. Through tactics deployed by our in-house Brand Safety Team, along with our partnership with DoubleVerify to detect and proactively avoid invalid traffic across all devices, the majority of properties involved were already blocked by SpotX prior to this article being published. In fact, less than a dollar in the last week was transacted on the apps/websites involved. Additionally, over the last 6 months, we found similar results with only .09% of impressions transacted coming from the apps/websites involved."
29	StartApp		"We appreciate you brought this matter to our attention. The investigation is currently underway."
30	TapJoy		"Our in-app platform is based on a performance-based pricing model, so it is inherently less prone to fraudulent activity than impression-based advertising platforms. The continuous feedback loop we get from our advertising partners around the quality of our traffic, combined with our risk and fraud prevention tools, minimizes the downside risk for all of our partners. We take fraud very seriously, and work quickly to remove fraudulent sources from our network the moment they are recognized. In response to information provided to us by BuzzFeed News, we conducted an internal investigation of the apps in question and found that of the 128 entries on BuzzFeed News’s Connected Apps and Websites list, 15 apps had some evidence of attempting to leverage our platform. Those apps have now been permanently disabled from our network. Fortunately, very little traffic was coming from the apps that had been identified. Only 7 of the apps had generated any earnings, and the total earnings was $3,800 going back to Q1 2015. The majority of that revenue was through just one app that was suspended from our network in March 2017 following an investigation of their Q1 2017 earnings that showed potentially fraudulent behavior. Based on our understanding of the fraud (spoofing bundle ID) we don’t believe we have significant of exposure on our supply since we use our own app and currency IDs. This is reflected in the minimal historic earnings mentioned above."		$3,800
31	Telaria		"With regard to your specific question, we conducted a forensic audit of our system against the list you provided us and are pleased to report that our rigorous process detected this fraud and filtered it out some time ago, before it reached our demand. As we constantly monitor this process, we immediately take action to purge any emerging issues our systems flag. Because of the way we work with partners, including Pixalate and White Ops, we have seen almost zero impact of this fraud on our business."
32	Unity Ads		"We take questionable activity, fraud, and invalid traffic across our ad platform very seriously. We have mechanisms in place to prevent different types of fraudulent or malicious activity. While we have yet to find instances of this type of deceptive activity, we are continuing to investigate." - Ingrid Lestiyo, GM of Monetization, Unity Technologies.
33	Velis	Emailed
34	Vungle		"Vungle takes all claims of ad fraud seriously and we have a dedicated team that regularly looks at our network to test and remove fraudulent apps. We undertook investigations in light of the article and found Vungle ad spend was responsible for 0.0034% of the potential fraud possible. We have already taken measures to remove affected apps from our network. Our goal is to deliver high-value users to our partners, meaning we continually put a lot of work into protecting our partners from fraud while delivering on performance."
35	Web3	Emailed
36	Webpals	Emailed
37	Yep Media	Emailed
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