Advertisers do run unprofitable ads and marketing campaigns all the times.

And they are fine with that too. That's the case of VC-backed startups: they accept a negative ROI to get the chance to start making money one day.

Then you have the less consciuous ones, which might be big brands who want to experiment a bit with new media/ad formats.

In any case, if you think about it, the real losers are...the honest publishers. Because the money on the table is not increased by fraud, it's just shared in a way that takes something away from good publishers to bad/fake ones.