A click is a beautifully confident little event. It arrives with a timestamp, an address, a device, a campaign, and the suggestion that a person wanted something. A marketer can sort it, price it, chart it, and feed it to an algorithm. The only awkward question is whether the person existed. Mike Schrobo has spent much of his career asking that question after the invoice was already paid. Eventually, he decided to ask it sooner.
Schrobo is the founder and CEO of Fraud Blocker, a Los Angeles-area software company built to inspect advertising traffic and stop suspicious visitors from consuming more budget. The company is a product of his earlier life as a performance marketer: more than two decades inside campaigns, including work at Team One, Hostway, the Los Angeles Times, and Bitcoin IRA. He managed budgets large enough for small percentages to become large checks. He also saw the same stubborn cast of noncustomers appear in the data - fake leads, automated bots, accidental taps, and competitors with an appetite for someone else’s ad spend.
His frustration was practical. A campaign could look busy while the sales team found no one useful at the other end. The dashboard counted activity with mechanical cheer. The business paid for it with real money. In 2019, Schrobo founded Fraud Blocker around a plain mission: reduce advertising waste by finding and blocking the clicks that do not belong.
The receipt has opinions
Digital advertising contains a peculiar conflict. The platform sells the traffic, measures the traffic, and decides which traffic was invalid. Schrobo’s phrasing is less diplomatic and more memorable: ad platforms “grade their own homework.” His advice is not to abandon them. It is to bring a second pencil.
Fraud Blocker sits in that checking layer. Its software monitors traffic, evaluates signals associated with devices and IP addresses, assigns fraud scores, and sends exclusions to connected advertising accounts. The aim is to prevent a suspicious visitor from seeing or clicking another ad. A refund can repair part of a ledger. A timely block can prevent the event, protect the remaining budget, and keep the click out of the decisions that follow.
“Ad platforms grade their own homework and results therefore require a healthy amount of skepticism.”Mike Schrobo, 2026
This is the useful distinction in Schrobo’s story. He does not frame click fraud only as theft by the teaspoon. He frames it as contamination. A fake click can distort conversion rates. A fabricated lead can send a salesperson on an errand to nowhere. Retargeting can keep pursuing an invented user. Automated bidding can study the pattern and helpfully purchase more of it. The original loss may be a few dollars. The lesson absorbed by the machine can be more expensive.
Schrobo’s favorite defense is verification at the moment of the click. It borrows the urgency of cybersecurity and applies it to media buying. If a campaign manager waits until the monthly report to notice an unnatural spike, the budget has gone and the data has already joined the system. His proposed mental model is crisp: treat each paid click as a security event that needs authentication.
A marketer builds a checkpoint
His route into software did not begin with a security lab. It began in advertising. After studying marketing at George Mason University in the late 1990s, Schrobo worked at the agency Team One from 2000 to 2005. Marketing roles at Hostway and the Los Angeles Times followed. Later, at Bitcoin IRA, he moved through director and senior director positions to become head of marketing. The thread was acquisition: finding attention, measuring it, and turning it into growth.
That background gave him an operator’s view of fraud. A security researcher might begin with the bot. Schrobo begins with the campaign. What did the click cost? What did it teach the bidding system? Which audience, placement, device, or geography now looks more valuable than it should? The product was designed from the advertiser’s seat because he had spent years sitting there.
Fraud Blocker’s public launch on AppSumo in 2023 offers a small window into Schrobo’s operating temperament. Customer comments became a release queue. Early updates added subdomain support, unlocked domains, click limits, more account connections, faster reporting tables, and finer team access. He wrote directly to buyers, explained what had shipped, previewed what was next, and ended with a compact signature: “Onwards.”
That launch also exposed the unglamorous center of company building. The updates were not manifestos about changing the internet. They were lists: a connection fixed, a table made faster, a permission made more precise. Fraud itself may arrive disguised by millions of devices, but the defense is assembled one release at a time. Schrobo’s public notes kept the two scales together. He could describe the broad incentive problem behind invalid traffic, then return to a customer asking for another Google Ads connection. For an operator, the philosophy only matters if it survives contact with the settings page.
The word suits a category with no finish line. Detection improves, fraud adapts, and a comfortable rule becomes a loophole. Schrobo’s company says it now evaluates more than 100 signals in real time. The precise number matters less than the posture: no single clue gets to declare a visitor human.
The bots learned body language
Older bots often behaved like interns trying very hard to look busy. They clicked too quickly, lingered for implausible periods, or left a cursor frozen in one spot. Rules could catch the stiffness. Schrobo says AI-driven automation is getting better at randomness, the messiness that people produce without thinking. A bot can add cursor jitters. It can scroll to a depth that matches the article. It can vary its pauses.
That improvement changes what counts as evidence. A natural-looking session may no longer come from a person. An agentic browser may be genuinely useful automation, malicious traffic, or something between the two. For advertisers charged when the click arrives, the philosophical question acquires a price tag.
Fraud Blocker’s 2026 analysis of 200 million clicks catalogued stranger patterns. In one example, a single device appeared across more than 80 countries in a few days, rotating through residential proxies in a pattern the company calls location-hopping. Another technique recycled legitimate click identifiers across many devices and addresses. The identifiers looked proper. Their travels did not.
The study reported an average invalid click rate of 11.4 percent across Google Ads traffic in its sample, with display and video campaigns reaching 35.5 percent and app campaigns at 3.3 percent. These are company findings, not universal constants. Their value is diagnostic. “Average traffic” is a fiction assembled from wildly different neighborhoods. A marketer who only watches the blended number can miss where the trouble lives.
Trust is not a measurement plan
Schrobo is building a business on skepticism, but his version is disciplined rather than gloomy. He does not need every click to be sinister. He needs every expensive signal to earn confidence. The company’s approach combines device fingerprints, IP behavior, geographic consistency, referral information, VPN detection, and other clues. Suspicion becomes a score; a score can become an exclusion.
There is a wider operating lesson here. Whenever the seller also provides the measurement, prudent buyers create an independent record. Marketplaces reconcile orders. Finance teams match invoices. Growth teams should validate traffic. The point is not that the primary system is always wrong. It is that incentives are architecture, and good architecture accounts for them.
“The best defense is to verify intent at the moment of the click.”Mike Schrobo
His ambition for Fraud Blocker follows from that principle. He wants advertisers to move from observing suspicious performance after the fact to protecting campaigns in real time. The shift sounds small, from report to response. Operationally, it changes who gets the next impression, what data reaches the model, and whether the sales team spends its afternoon with prospects or phantoms.
Schrobo’s career has been an education in attention’s bookkeeping. At an agency, a newspaper, a financial technology company, and now his own software business, the central problem kept returning in different clothes: how do you know the audience is real, and how much should you pay to reach it? Fraud Blocker is his current answer. It is not a rejection of digital advertising. It is a demand for a cleaner receipt.
The click remains beautifully confident. Schrobo simply prefers that it bring identification.