Racketeers Use Bots, Android Apps to Run Massive Ad Fraud Scheme

Online advertisers have good reason to be running scared these days. Last week, news broke that Facebook had massively inflated its video watching metrics for years. The problem with this approach has been removed, all of which have been watched only when they are overused. Advertisers were furious the metric, as were journals, who have been unaware of the importance of "pivot to video" that they do not align with the media consumption of their established audiences.

Now, we've gotten a new "online advertising is broken and everything is terrible" problem to talk about. An in-depth Buzzfeed investigation found a complex network of shell companies devoted to buying up Android apps built by other people and then monetizing them with an army of bots.

Now that you can not seem so so, and you've had tremendous bot problems. What sets this scheme is that the owners have been contacted and offered cash up front to their products. Once they sold, the purchasers did not sell them – they mined them for information on the end users actually behaved. And then they have been used to a large number of situations in which they have been involved.

Image by Buzzfeed

That that that……………………………. More than 125 Android apps and websites were "connected to a network of front and shell companies in Cyprus, Malta, British Virgin Islands, Croatia, Bulgaria, and elsewhere. More than a dozen of the affected apps have been targeted at kids or teens, and a person has been involved in the scheme estimates it has stolen hundreds of millions of dollars. (A full list of the apps, the websites, and their associated companies connected to the scheme can be found in this spreadsheet.) As an extension of this practice, could be used to generate a realistic action model that could then be used to commit fraud. The apps have been installed on 115 million devices.

Why Should You Care About Advertising Fraud?

Let's get one thing out of the way up front. You probably hate ads. You hate the ads on ExtremeTech, you hate the ads on other sites You probably also understand that to eat. This does not make you feel like you're going to be so bad. But you shoulds care – and here's why.

They want to know that the ad they spend is bringing them some kind of benefit. In the past week, we've seen two major stories, with major implications. Buzzfeed reports that between $ 700- $ 800M may have been raised in the mobile app just in 2018. And that's just the tip of the fraudulent iceberg. Adobe has estimated that up to 28 percent of all web traffic may be driven by bots.

When Facebook started releasing its video metrics, newsrooms all over the country tore up their roadmaps and make an aggressive pivot-to-video, oftentimes laying off. The idea failed almost everywhere. Companies made this transition because they were desperate to capture advertising dollars and advertisers wanted to follow Facebook's lead. The result? Tremendous damage, lost trust, fired employees – and all based on fraud. It's not going to stop happening, and there are serious ramifications for the websites and companies you like to follow.

Google has taken action against the bots now that they've been aware of the problem but had not detected it before. A great deal of the problem on Google, whose processes for reviewing Google Play are not as robust as Apple's.

More details, and the response of the scam runners themselves. Buzzfeed caught them, can be found in the original story.

Now Read: App Developers Can Stalk You Around the Web If You Uninstall Their App, Facebook Admits Its New Portal Device Is Just Another Way to Spy on You, and No, Google Did not Just Sneak DRM Into All Android Apps