Many Chinese companies have risen on the back of mobile advertising, but a new report says fraud is rampant in the sector.

Global ad revenue wasted on fraudulent traffic could reach $16.4 billion in 2017, according to information from AppLift China. AppLift conducted a twelve-week study and found out that certain app categories are more susceptible to fraud than others, with entertainment apps and news apps seeing the most fraud traffic.

Mobile app categories with the most fraudulent activity include entertainment, news, and education with 22%, 22% and 21%, respectively. Meanwhile the apps with the least fraudulent activity dealt with parenting and shopping with 2% and 3%, respectively. More complex and sophisticated types of fraud have evolved such as click injection and click stuffing.

"As a leader in the mobile ad space, we firmly believe it is our responsibility to not only focus our efforts on detecting and fighting ad fraud, but to also share our learnings with industry peers so that we can all better understand the risks and fight fraud together," said Tim Koschella, CEO of AppLift.