News emerged recently that a massive network of fraudulent Android apps and websites have been scamming marketers out of millions of dollars. Now, Google is taking action on the issue, clamping down on the network and tightening its restrictions further.
The network of at least 125 apps and websites was exposed by a BuzzFeed report. Scammers from a fake company called 'We Purchase Apps' target legitimate app developers, offering to buy their apps if they're not making enough revenue to stay afloat. The scammers then add those apps to a growing list of shell companies they've established in Cyprus, Malta, British Virgin Islands, Israel, and Bulgaria.
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The thieves then tracked the behaviour of human users of those apps they've acquired Using that data, they trained a "vast network of bots" to mimic their actions and generate fake traffic, thereby conning advertisers out of millions of dollars paid for in-app ads, including some offered on Google's own ad platform.
Of course, because the bots were mimicking user behaviour, they were harder to detect. Most of those identified by BuzzFeed were games, though others also included a flashlight app, selfie app, and one for eating healthy. They were collectively installed more 115 million times, with one of the apps even supposedly gaining 20 million downloads.
The publication alerted Google to the scam last week, and the tech company began removing the offending apps from its Play Store. They're far from done however, and are continuing to flag, delete, and blacklist ad-scamming apps they find.
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Google says it's lost a little under $10 million in the process, thanks to the fake ad views. However Pixalate, the fraud detection firm that first spotted this scam network, pegs the figure at closer to $75 million a year.