Southeast Asia’s e-commerce market is well on its way to exceeding Google’s prediction of hitting US$200bn in value by 2025, with e-commerce players such as Lazada, Shopee, and Tokopedia expanding their efforts in the region to meet ever-growing customer demands. E-commerce growth in Southeast Asia is driven by a high mobile internet penetration rate, young consumers and an increase in disposable income.
According to a We Are Social Report, in 2018, there were 391 million mobile internet users in Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, and Vietnam alone. However, the rise of e-commerce also gives rise to a new problem: online fraud.
Online fraud cost retailers an estimated US$57.8bn globally in 2017 and is especially problematic in Southeast Asia. An AppsFlyer report titled Fraud Rising: How Bots and Malware Are Compromising APAC’s Apps in 2019, found that e-commerce companies are most affected by ad fraud. According to this report, the region’s losses accounted for 40 per cent of the total estimated ad fraud losses in the APAC region which totalled US$650m.