Rich Kahn, CEO of Anura and one of the digital advertising industry's most uncompromising voices on ad fraud, joins Pesach Lattin on The ADOTAT Show for a conversation that should be required watching for every media buyer, brand marketer, programmatic trader, and ad tech executive who has ever looked at a campaign dashboard and assumed the numbers were real. They are not. At least not half of them. In this episode, Rich Kahn breaks down the $140 billion annual ad fraud problem that the programmatic advertising ecosystem has systematically chosen to ignore, explains why the pre-bid filtering your DSP is selling you catches roughly one to three percent of actual invalid traffic, and describes in detail the AI-assisted bot attack that defeated every IVT vendor in the market simultaneously, including his own company, for two months in 2024. He also walks through what happened on the floor of Affiliate World Bangkok, where fraudulent traffic certified to defeat all fraud detection systems was being sold openly at convention booths like any other media product. This is not a theoretical conversation. This is twenty years of data, delivered by the person who has been running it. But this episode is also something else entirely. Rich Kahn grew up on welfare, got married at 21, bought his first house at 23, turned down an invitation to the 2000 Olympics because he had just started a job and couldn't afford to leave, watched a $60 million acquisition offer evaporate two weeks before closing when the dot-com bubble burst, and has bootstrapped every single company he has ever built because venture capital was never an option and the mortgage was always real. He is one of the most honest and specific people we have ever had on this show about what entrepreneurship actually looks like when the downside is not a learning experience but a family that doesn't eat. We also talk about his open heart surgery last October, the two weeks he spent unable to check his email, what his company did without him, and what it means when a man who has checked his inbox every single day of his adult life finally gets proof that the thing he built can survive without him. TOPICS COVERED IN THIS EPISODE: Ad fraud 2024, programmatic advertising fraud, invalid traffic IVT, sophisticated invalid traffic SIVT, pre-bid fraud filtering, DoubleVerify, Integral Ad Science IAS, DSP fraud rates, display advertising fraud, bot traffic, click fraud, ad verification, digital advertising waste, media buying fraud, affiliate marketing fraud, Affiliate World Bangkok, AI-generated fraud, machine learning ad fraud, bot detection, fraud detection technology, ad tech supply chain transparency, MRC accreditation, IAB Tag certification, programmatic transparency, brand safety, ad spend waste, Google ad fraud, Meta ad fraud, Facebook ad fraud, walled garden fraud, open exchange fraud Bootstrapped entrepreneurship, serial entrepreneur, dot-com bubble, dot-com crash 2000, Pay for Surf, welfare to wealth, first generation entrepreneur, family entrepreneurship, financial risk, business without venture capital, EOS entrepreneurial operating system, delegation leadership, CEO burnout, founder identity, open heart surgery recovery, work life balance, control freak leadership, email addiction, team building, scaling without funding, bootstrapping multimillion dollar companies Ad tech podcast, digital marketing podcast, programmatic podcast, ADOTAT Show, Pesach Lattin, Rich Kahn Anura, ad fraud podcast, marketing technology podcast, adtech 2024, martech podcast, media buying podcast, performance marketing podcast SPONSORS: Troutman Amin LLP, the law firm that understands ad tech. And Incremental.com, where smart marketers go to measure what's actually working. SUBSCRIBE for weekly conversations with the people who actually run the business of digital advertising, without the talking points, without the spin, and without the bots. ADOTAT. The show the industry didn't ask for but probably needed. 🎵 Copyrighted music licensed from Lickd. https://lickd.co Jerk It Out by Caesars, https://t.lickd.co/l/ynK5DVPgW6R 🎵 Copyrighted music licensed from Lickd. https://lickd.co Kung Fu Fighting by Carl Douglas, https://t.lickd.co/l/75NagjRmYJR 🎵 Copyrighted music licensed from Lickd. https://lickd.co Can't Hold Us (feat. Ray Dalton) by Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, Macklemore, Ryan Lewis, Ray Dalton, https://t.lickd.co/l/aZWaVwdQpOy