What AdTech Taught Me About Financial Fraud, with Gilit Saporta

Yeah, that's amazing.

And the reason why I was so keen to have you on the show is because I think you had such a fascinating journey.

And when I look at it, I see three things.

First, the fact that you've spent almost two decades at cutting-edge teams or building cutting-edge technologies.

And it's not just one team, right? So you've seen several problems from several different angles for a very extended period of time, like always on the forefront dealing with frontier problems and frontier solutions.

So this is already quite interesting.

But then there's also the fact that you've recently, I mean, recently, six years ago or so, transitioned from doing, you know, like financial fraud and maybe econ fraud at the a space that I don't know anything about.

And now the third thing I think, which is like for me, the main reason why I wanted to have you on the show is because I also think that, I mean, not everybody knows that, but like some of your roles throughout these companies were training roles, which kind of like positioned you in a place where you had to think a lot about abstractions, a lot about the methodology and the theory behind both fraud actual fraud as well as fraud prevention.

And I thought, who is better to talk to about fraud in general and the differences between financial fraud prevention and fraud prevention in edtech than Gilit.

So I'm super excited to dive into it.

And let me start with the first thing that came to my mind.

Actually, I'm not sure that I even know what edtech fraud is.

I can imagine, but I can also imagine that there are Like a couple of typologies, like the main typologies that you see, and maybe I'm aware of some of them, maybe I'm not.

So maybe if we can start just discussing that and how that is different from financial fraud.

Yeah, for sure.

And I think you and I both share this passion for abstraction of fraud attacks and methodologies and training, which... is a good way to always help our teams and the industry in general think about what's the next potential attack and potential threat we should be looking out for.

In ad tech, we define fraud based on any kind of manipulation that...

Out there to monetize and drain the advertising budgets of brands.

The largest brands in the world are our clients today, which means I get the fun and fun.

very, very stressful experience of having to explain fraud attacks to you name it.

Brands like Disney and any other are kind of my potential.

Not even in theory, you get to talk to many of the largest brands out there about what's impacting their audiences.

And you can imagine that there's a ton of sensitivity there.

not just to the financial impact, but also to the brand suitability, brand safety aspect of what does it mean for such a large organization to be perceived as monetizing fraud or supporting, allowing fraud, allowing children to be exposed to content that they shouldn't be exposed to because some tricky manipulations within the pipelines made them reach a website that was just part of a fraud scheme.

We see that all the time.