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Smartphone Apps Fraudulently Collecting Revenue From Invisible Ads

Posted by timothy on from the sharp-stick-in-the-eye-is-too-good-for-'em dept.

JoeyRox writes: Thousands of mobile applications are downloading ads that are never presented to users but which collected an estimated $850 million in fraudulent revenue from advertisers per year. The downloading of these invisible ads can slow down users' phones and consume up to 2GB of bandwidth per day. Forensiq, an online technology firm fighting fraud for advertisers, found over 5,000 apps displayed unseen ads on both Apple and Android devices. "The sheer amount of activity generated by apps with fake ads was what initially exposed the scam. Forensiq noticed that some apps were calling up ads at such a high frequency that the intended audience couldn't possibly be actual humans."

5 of 129 comments (clear)

  1. Gee, I'm really torn... by jenningsthecat · · Score: 5, Interesting

    On the one hand, fraudsters who steal phone users' bandwidth in order to reap revenue from advertisers, are scum.

    On the other hand, so many advertisers are scum as well, and the enemy of my enemy might be my friend. I might be willing to lose a bite out of my data cap in order to stick it to advertisers. Oops, did I say that out loud?

    --
    'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
    1. Re:Gee, I'm really torn... by Solandri · · Score: 4, Interesting

      While you may disagree with the price exacted by advertisers, they are still providing you with something in exchange. They help pay for the website you are visiting. Without their ads, the site likely wouldn't exist, or would exist in a considerably less useful form.

      Ad fraud steals money from advertisers, period. They are taking money from the advertisers without providing a good or service in exchange. This is theft.

  2. 3rd party lib or app itself ? by perpenso · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I wonder if a 3rd party lib is responsible for any of this, quietly committing the fraud without the app developer's knowledge? Unless those 5,000+ apps are coming from a relatively small number of developers.

  3. Hosts on the Android by TheDarkMaster · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The first thing I do after a system update or rooting is changing the host file to block all know ads servers.

    --
    Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
  4. Also consumes device space... by zarmanto · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I'm pretty sure I had one of these offending apps, at one time -- though, in my case it may have been a legitimate error on the part of the developer, rather then malicious: It was an alarm clock app for iOS, which displayed a banner ad when you had it in portrait mode but not when you had it in landscape mode. Funny thing is, I learned in the course of time that it was still downloading those ads regardless of orientation, because there's an odd quirk in the way some (or all?) iOS apps download ads; they retain the ad on the device for some indeterminate period of time. Since I just left the iPad charging and sitting on that alarm clock app whenever I wasn't actively using the iPad, this caused that one app to bloat to ridiculous proportions over time, eventually filling up multiple gigabytes of space -- that is to say, all of the remaining space on the iPad.

    (Naturally, I eventually ditched that app and sought out one which was entirely ad-free.)