Improving the Security of Bing Ads by Detecting Fraudulent Spend

In Bing Ads, we are constantly improving the security of our system to make the ad marketplace safe and secure. Like any modern service that handles millions of transactions a day, we monitor advertiser accounts to detect any fraudulent spend. Our ability to identify suspicious activity and suspend fraudulent behavior helps protect our
customers and ensure their accounts are only being used as intended. As part of this process, it is equally important for us to be transparent about the state of an account or campaign, regardless of whether customers are using a tool from Bing Ads or from one of our API partners. As a result, we are adding two new states to our API WSDL to indicate if an account or campaign has been suspended for suspected fraudulent activity.

In this first phase, we are only updating the WSDL interfaces to include these new values; these states will not be used in the API at this time. This allows API customers to update their proxies without causing a breaking change. After 90 days we may start returning these new values, in which case, your client must be on the latest proxy to be able to handle the accounts or campaigns in these states.

Towards the end of Q2 2014, we will start returning these states via the API. If we detect that the overall account should be suspended, we will mark the AccountLifeCycleStatus to Suspended. If we only believe individual campaigns have been compromised, then we will mark the CampaignStatus as Suspended. While in the suspended state, ads will not serve so that we can protect the customer by restricting any further fraudulent activity.

For either of these cases, please instruct your users to contact Bing Ads Support to verify the activity and to have their account or campaign unsuspended. For security reasons, we do not have a process via the API to remove an account or campaign from the suspended state.

As always, feel free to ask any questions or provide feedback in the comments.