The Walking Dead: No Man's Land.
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How Next Games stopped ad fraud in The Walking Dead: No Man’s Land

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 4 min

You could say that a lot of the users in The Walking Dead: No Man’s Land mobile game were zombies. That’s because they just weren’t human.

Next Games discovered that hundreds of thousands of users provided by several advertising networks weren’t real people. It uncovered them using analytics tools from marketing intelligence firm Tune. This is just one case in many that illustrates the extent of advertising fraud. Ad fraud is expected to cost digital advertisers more than $7.2 billion in 2016, according to a study by White Ops and the Association of National Advertisers.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.