PropellerAds has published its Ads Safety Report for the first quarter of 2026, showing that more than 36,000 advertising campaigns were rejected during the period.
A total of 36,085 campaigns were rejected or blocked for breaching platform rules and terms. Adult, pornographic or erotic content accounted for 47.8% of all rejections, while malware and unsafe landing pages made up 23.3%.
Other categories were much smaller: copyright violations represented 5.9% of rejections, prohibited products 3.5%, false investment claims 2.5%, and destination URLs inaccessible during moderation 4.1%.
Suspension figures showed a different concentration of risk. Cloaking accounted for 68.1% of all account suspensions in the quarter, making it the main reason advertisers were removed from the platform.
Cloaking refers to advertisers showing compliant content to moderators while serving prohibited content to users. The report described it as a more deliberate form of abuse than routine policy breaches because it relies on systems designed to evade checks.
Malware was the next biggest driver of suspensions at 10.5%. Fake tech support schemes accounted for 6.8%, fake identity submissions 4.4%, scam landing pages 4.1%, and confirmed fraud 1.4%.
Many of those secondary categories overlap with cloaking rather than standing apart from it. That suggests a large share of abuse cases involve several layers of deception rather than a single breach.
Compared with 2025, the overall pattern changed little. Cloaking remained the dominant cause of suspensions, while malware continued to rank as the most consistent secondary risk.
Geographic patterns
The report grouped higher-risk markets into three broad profiles based on the fraud activity observed: Tier-1 markets, parts of Latin America and Turkey.
Tier-1 markets identified in the report were the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and Germany. These countries tend to attract more sophisticated fraud because higher CPC and CPA payouts make it worthwhile for bad actors to invest in cloaking and malware operations.
Latin American markets listed were Brazil, Mexico, Argentina and Colombia. In those countries, lower traffic costs and large audiences support higher-volume fraud, especially misleading creatives and scam flows linked to financial offers.
Turkey was presented as a separate category with a mixed profile. The market draws subscription fraud, deceptive offer schemes and prohibited campaigns that exploit regulatory gaps.
Kate Shmeleva, Head of Business Security at PropellerAds, commented on those regional differences. "Tier-1 markets combine high payouts with strict regulations, making them a prime target for cloaking tactics. In Turkey, relatively low-cost traffic is often exploited to run prohibited campaigns, while in rapidly growing LATAM markets, strong demand for financial offers creates opportunities for fraudsters to imitate trusted banks and services to mislead users," Shmeleva said.
Moderation focus
The findings offer a snapshot of where enforcement teams spend most of their time. A small number of categories accounted for most campaign rejections, while one tactic dominated account suspensions.
That distinction matters for advertisers and publishers using large ad networks, where moderation must separate rule-breaking creative from more organised efforts to bypass controls. The data indicates that straightforward policy breaches remain common, but the heavier enforcement burden comes from advertisers concealing what users will actually see.
PropellerAds said its Policy and Security teams monitor fraud patterns across the platform, combining automated detection with manual review. It publishes regular reports to give advertisers and partners a clearer picture of risk trends across the advertising ecosystem.
The platform reaches more than one billion users each month. In the latest figures, the clearest signal was the weight of cloaking in suspension activity, with more than two-thirds of account removals linked to that single tactic.