Competitor click fraud in digital advertising:How managers can navigate the paradoxes of invisible sabotage

Digital advertisers increasingly rely on dashboards, automated bidding, and platform filters to manage campaign performance, yet these systems can conceal competitor click fraud (CCF) that depletes budgets and corrupts optimization signals. CCF occurs when rivals generate illegitimate clicks to exhaust advertising budgets, distort performance metrics, or weaken auction outcomes. We argue that CCF is not only a technical detection problem, but a set of tensions and governance problems created by opaque data, misaligned incentives, and automated decision systems. Based on interviews, practitioner responses, and expert consultations, we identify five paradoxical tensions that explain why firms struggle to assess, prioritize, and manage CCF: measurability versus unknowability, incentives to combat versus incentives to accept fraud, multidimensional harms versus perceived harmlessness, automation and AI as remedy versus vulnerability, and common competitive tactics versus competitive sabotage. We show how these tensions encourage pragmatic disengagement, underinvestment in controls, and recurring rediscovery cycles. We offer practices for building auditable advertising governance, including platform scrutiny, anomaly monitoring, traffic-quality KPIs, calibrated fraud filters, and cross-functional escalation routines.