Mobile apps may not be genuinely helping the marketers. There are thousands of apps which run ads which cannot be seen by the users both on Apple and Android devices. Advertisers pay for these ads, and these are fake ads. This is a kind of fraud. The ads are called up at such a high frequency that the target audience cannot possibly see them. Ads in such rapid succession cannot not be seen by humans. They hit the numbers by showing as many as five ads in the background for every visible ad to users. Some applications scroll through the ads even after the app had been closed. At times, the phone takes a consumer to app store even when the consumer has not touched the screen. Pop up ads appear even when there is no accidental clicking. There are complaints of the phones getting slow or phones crashing. They run a code that produces a steady stream of unseen ads. To monitor this , it is necessary to assess the bandwidth usage over time. Google and Apple may no have the ability to do this. In online ad world,  fraud is endemic. The brands pay for the adds, and lose track of where the ads end up. There are many layers of automated intermediaries.The write-up is based on a report by Forensiq, a firm that tracks fraud in online advertising.