PropellerAds Publishes 2025 Ads Safety Report: Moderation Outcomes, Confirmed Suspensions, and Emerging Fraud Trends

LIMASSOL, Cyprus, Feb. 12, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- PropellerAds, a leading global ad platform specializing in performance-driven advertising solutions, has released its Ads Safety Report 2025, summarizing moderation and security outcomes across the platform and outlining how fraud patterns evolved in 2025. The report focuses on preventive controls (campaigns declined before launch), confirmed enforcement actions, and the highest-impact fraud trends observed by PropellerAds' Policy and Security teams.

Preventive moderation: what was declined even before campaigns went live

In 2025, PropellerAds recorded a 35% year-over-year increase in campaigns flagged and declined during moderation, which the report attributes to expanded preventive controls and enhanced moderation coverage.

The report emphasizes that the figures reflect the number of rejections or blocks (not unique rejected or blocked campaigns), meaning a single campaign may receive multiple rejections.

Top reject or block reasons in 2025 (share of rejects or blocks):

• Adult, pornographic, sexual, or erotic content: 60% (439,927 rejects or blocks)
• Antivirus alerts or malware detected on campaign-related domains: 26% (191,103)
• Automatic file downloads (desktop or mobile): 3.4% (24,500)
• Other policy violations: 3.0% (22,127)
  Additional categories included region-specific restricted content (2.1%), trademark violations (1.7%), inaccessible destination URLs during moderation (1.1%), prohibited products (1.0%), malware-related scare claims (0.7%), and deceptive financial advice promises (0.5%).

Confirmed enforcement: why advertisers' accounts were suspended

Account suspensions are issued for confirmed, high-risk, or repeated violations identified via automated systems and following expert review. In 2025, cloaking accounted for 78.2% of suspensions (1,311), followed by malware-related violations at 7.6% (127), and other violations at 6.0% (100). Other confirmed suspension reasons included ransomware attacks (2.9%, 49), failed KYC ("fake ID") (2.6%, 44), scam landing pages (2.0%, 33), and confirmed fraud with multiple signals combined (0.7%, 12).

Key fraud trends observed in 2025

The report notes four major patterns: infrastructure-heavy cloaking (multi-layer routing and conditional delivery), malvertising via direct file distribution, messenger account hijacking attempts targeting Telegram and WhatsApp, and compromised infrastructure/hijacked domains (e.g., expired domains or breached servers). From a technical standpoint, approximately 80% of identified attack vectors targeted Windows and Android users.

PropellerAds also describes how internally developed systems use AI/ML as supporting tools for anomaly detection, interaction-pattern analysis, and faster prioritization of high-risk signals, while keeping infrastructure checks and expert review central to enforcement.

Media Contact:
Michael Gor
+35797767567
[email protected]

SOURCE PropellerAds