125 Android apps ran ads on bots worth $ 10 million

A band sophisticated robots have been able to circumvent Google's checks to put a gigantic fraud operation in the heart of the Google Play Store.

A survey of Buzzfeed News found a total of 125 apps that were purchased by a company called We Purchase Apps or one of its employees, Tzachi Ezrati. The prices were generous and the payments in Bitcoin, while the company's contact details – along with a UK phone number and a US residential address – showed that things were not what they seemed.

Once the developers sold their apps, they were updated to show that they belonged to different companies in Bulgaria, Cyprus and Russia.

Of course, as you've probably already guessed, the deal seems to be failing and, in fact, applications have become part of a fraudulent advertising scheme in which advertisers were forced to pay for advertising slots never seen by the bots.

So where are our zombie apps coming in? Well, it seems that the gang has used the actual human behavior of these established applications to form a network of neurons to mimic them, thus avoiding detection by Google's systems.

The result is that anyone using one of the 125 applications was tracked, recorded and, to a lesser extent, cloned. This included a number of apps for children and teens.

In total, it is estimated that applications have been downloaded a total of 115 million times, with a single application recording 20 million hits.

The applications are owned by several companies in several countries, which has the effect of disgusting the size and scale of the system. When a fraud detection company, Pixalate, spotted part of the system and suggested that it could pay $ 75 million a year in fraudulent advertising revenue, an anonymous message sent by a fraudsters close suggesting that the actual number is 10 times higher.

Google has already deleted 40 apps, blocked access to multiple websites and closed multiple developer accounts.

According to official estimates, a total of $ 10 million would have been cashed before the project was abolished. The more casual attitude of Google vis-à-vis the Play Store compared to the Apple App Store has sparked criticism in the past and it seems that when this case explodes, Google will be at again obliged to explain it. μ