Apollo Exposed: What 400M fake ad requests reveal about fraud

Audio advertising is booming. With programmatic audio spend projected to surpass $2 billion in 2025, it’s become one of the most promising — and vulnerable — channels in digital media. Where innovation leads, cybercrime follows. And the recent Apollo operation uncovered by HUMAN and The Trade Desk is a case study in just how sophisticated, and damaging, that fraud can be. At its peak, Apollo accounted for 400 million fraudulent bid requests per day, making it the largest audio-related ad fraud scheme ever detected. But what makes Apollo especially troubling isn’t just the scale — it’s how convincingly it mimicked legitimate traffic, exploited supply chain blind spots, and leveraged malware-infected CTV devices to obscure its origin.