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Killing Click Fraud Before It Kills Your Growth: How TRIBEOS Is Taking on the Internet’s Most Profitable Crime

Most founders think their biggest advertising challenge is getting more clicks. Matt Gallant knows better — the real danger is paying for clicks that never came from humans in the first place.

Gallant, CEO and co-founder of TRIBEOS, has spent decades running digital campaigns that moved eight figures annually. Along the way, he discovered a problem that the industry mostly ignores: ad fraud is the second most profitable crime in the world — and it’s quietly draining budgets for advertisers in every sector.

“We tested 10,000 websites,” Gallant says. “93% of them had fraudulent traffic. The scale of it shocked us.”

Why Ad Fraud Is So Rampant

Ad fraud works because it’s easy to do and hard to detect. Fraudsters spin up thousands of fake websites, buy or build bots to visit them, and plug into ad networks that resell this “traffic” to advertisers. The result? You pay for impressions and clicks that never came from real buyers.

Big walled gardens like Google, Facebook, and YouTube have more safeguards — but the moment you buy display ads outside of those platforms, the fraud rate skyrockets.

For Gallant, this wasn’t just an annoyance. It was a direct hit to growth.

“If you’re spending millions on digital ads and losing 15–20% of your data — or worse, your spend — to fraud, that’s the difference between scaling and shutting down.”

From Tracking Frustration to Ad Fraud Prevention

TRIBEOS began in 2013 with Gallant building Gold Lantern, an advertising attribution software platform designed to solve another pain point: inaccurate tracking. Even before the “death of cookies,” Gallant was losing key data points that Google Analytics couldn’t recover. Gold Lantern provided digital marketing performance tracking with features like:

  • Cross-domain sales attribution

  • Return-on-ad-spend tracking over time

  • Detailed reporting down to the ad and link level

But in 2017, Gallant met co-founder James Wallace, who specialized in ad fraud detection. Combining tracking with fraud prevention became the obvious play — creating an enterprise adtech solution that could both measure and protect ad spend.

The Three-Tier Fraud Detection System

TRIBEOS fights fraud before and after the click:

  1. Pre-Bid Scoring – Analyzes websites for age, credibility, and other signals before buying an impression.

  2. Impression-Level Detection – Uses massive IP blacklists and pattern recognition to block known bot traffic.

  3. Post-Click Behavior Analysis – Tracks user interaction to spot unnatural patterns and identify sophisticated bots.

By filtering bad traffic for just $1.50–$2 in test spend, TRIBEOS can stop wasting hundreds per site — a 100x efficiency improvement over traditional approaches.

Why the Market Was Ready

Selling TRIBEOS to advertisers wasn’t the challenge. Gallant says he has $125M in signed LOIs from companies eager to protect their budgets. The harder part? Finding honest publishers with real human audiences to run campaigns on.

Still, the product’s positioning — secure, fraud-free advertising with transparent attribution — hit a nerve in a market jaded by inflated numbers and opaque networks.

Lessons for Founders From TRIBEOS’s Journey

Gallant’s story holds a few clear takeaways for tech founders and growth leaders:

  1. Target a Known Pain – Fraud was already on advertisers’ minds; TRIBEOS didn’t need to convince them it existed, only that they could stop it.

  2. Pair Measurement With Action – Tracking without prevention leaves money on the table. Prevention without measurement leaves you blind.

  3. Launch Earlier – Gallant admits he overbuilt before shipping. Early feedback would have sped up product-market fit.

  4. Hire to Your Weaknesses – As a visionary founder, Gallant’s biggest unlock was finding an “integrator” to run operations.

  5. Use Frameworks Early – TRIBEOS implemented EOS/Traction from day one to stay focused and execution-driven.

The Bigger Picture: Protecting Growth Capital

Every wasted ad dollar isn’t just lost spend — it’s lost runway. For companies relying on paid acquisition, ad fraud prevention is as strategic as conversion rate optimization.

TRIBEOS’s combination of fraud detection and deep attribution is part of a larger shift in performance marketing technology: moving from passive reporting to active protection.

As Gallant puts it:

“If ad fraud were solved, advertising would be more effective — and more entrepreneurs could scale their ideas without getting robbed.”