But an investigation by BuzzFeed News reveals that these seemingly separate apps and companies are today part of a massive, sophisticated digital advertising fraud scheme involving more than 125 Android apps and websites 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 are targeted at kids or teens, and a person involved in the scheme estimates it has stolen hundreds of millions of dollars from brands whose ads were shown to bots instead of actual humans.
Scammers were buying applications from developers, and after adding usage behavior tracking tools to these existing applications, used said data to mimic “real” user behaviour.
One way the fraudsters find apps for their scheme is to acquire legitimate apps through We Purchase Apps and transfer them to shell companies. They then capture the behavior of the app’s human users and program a vast network of bots to mimic it, according to analysis from Protected Media, a cybersecurity and fraud detection firm that analyzed the apps and websites at BuzzFeed News’ request.
Sure, this is all terrible and probably quite illegal, but honestly, you have to respect the ingenuity here.
Yup, and if you’re going to rip off somebody, might as well be advertisers. Fuck those people.
…and probably only profitable because of “retargeting”. (Allowing advertisers to cheap out on advertising by showing ads to high-value users once they move on to lower-cost sites.)
These sorts of schemes tend to involve taking advantage of retargeting to build fake high-value users (the bots), then sending them to scammer-controlled sites, so the scammer can get the ad revenue. (Those “Cheap traffic!” spam e-mails are the scammers trying to double-dip by getting you to pay to have your site used as part of the process.)
No targeted advertising would mean no retargeting, which would mean that whole ad fraud paradigm would collapse.
Edited 2018-10-24 02:07 UTC
It seems it’s not about ads in webpages, but apps…
It is about apps, but the scheme described in the article does sound like the scammers blended an together several types of scam, retargeting included.
The article mentions that both apps and websites were targeted and I didn’t see any mention of websites with existing audiences being purchased, which means that a traditional retargeting scam would have been the avenue exploited on that front.
Likewise, having apps sometimes report the wrong advertising ID to the network when displaying ads sounds like a means of exploiting retargeting.
The problem with retargeting is that it can be exploited by scammers as a means to get a lot more payoff from their efforts.
Edited 2018-10-26 14:30 UTC
No, you don’t.
Indeed. Ah! Soulbender, Kernel is back at its former hands.
😉
All those businesses should stop whining about creative people working hard to make a buck. Next they will be talking about more red tape and regulation that just kills innovation!!!
😉
I am sort hoping this kind of cheating would end up making the ad business redundant — if one can fake real users and the other party cannot separate them, there’s no point to pay for ads that nobody actually sees.
But I worry that Google and other big corporations with their networks can filter out bots based on their IP addresses and maybe geographical location with ease. Therefore this fake ad flow will most likely just pour into Google’s revenue and lessen the attraction of cheaper alternatives…
Then there’s also the possibility that apps themselves are categorized into premium and basic tiers and the verified popular apps get better ads. And that’s gonna damage little companies but personally I don’t give a damn about ad-funded apps anyway.
Edited 2018-10-24 10:03 UTC
Except that this sort of finely targeted advertising destroys advertising’s value to the buyer.
This post does a good job of explaining how it operates on the same principle as biological signalling theory and how “Whoever can target the best wins in the short term” is putting the industry at risk of a death spiral in the long term:
http://zgp.org/targeted-advertising-considered-harmful/
TL;DR: Ads in media like print have value as a signal because the end-user knows that a fly-by-night operation can’t afford to have that kind of advertising budget. (Like a peacock’s tail. Only the genuine article can survive despite that encumberment.) With targeted ads, for all you know, you’re the only person to see the ad.
You are of course making the assumption that somebody who is barraged with personal ads for a particular product realizes that no one else can see them.
You are also assuming that the advertising networks brand doesn’t matter – ie one way to tackle a drop of trust in ad’s is to brand the ad as a ‘Google’ ad.
The middlemans brand has become increasingly important in retail – people trust <insert fav retailer here > more that individual product brands.
What was more surprising is reading quality content in BuzzFeed. I only knew them for trash videos.
Advertisers got scammed out of millions? The abuser has become the abused. Bummer. Here’s the ZERO F’s I give: .
And to whomever is responsible for this, where should I send your beer?
If you’re smart enough to pull that off, One would assume that you’re smart enough to make it in a more legit business venture.
I am surprised it took so long to happen. There is no proof that anonymous clicks correspond to human clicks (touchscreen taps), despite this being the main premise of online advertising (then there is the issue of actual human clicks not necessarily corresponding to purchases, but whatever).
The online ad landscape is much like eBay, were every self-respecting seller selling shody used goods as “new” has a bunch of bot accounts engaging in virtual transactions with his account and feeding his account with 5-star feedback.
I expected Google to clean up the name of online advertising by only allowing eponymous clicks (by registered and verified by credit card users or something) and by rooting out fraud ads, but nope. Online ads still stink, and it’s a matter of time before the companies buying ads stop buying more. It turns out Steve Ballmer was right. But the market can stay irrational longer than he could stay CEO of Microsoft.
Edited 2018-10-24 17:36 UTC
Whats the alternative to online advertising? Newspaper? Magazine? Broadcast TV?
The older methods have much less reach associated with them now. Maybe in person ads at sporting events, or increased billboards? Or additional adds on real products? This CocaCola was brought to you by Samsung in partnership with Clevlend health clinic
These and leasing space for a certain amount of time on a website. Just like you would lease space on a billboard.
The whole premise of pay-per-click and personalized ads, which is supposed to be better than the old “spray wide” method, is basically snake oil based on wrong assumptions.
The past is the new future. =)
The problem of this method is that it is not self-service. So it present a scale problem.
What made the current targeted ad market so popular is that if you have a site and want to show ads to get some money, you just fill a form at a AD agency, insert some code on your website, and that’s pretty much it.
And if you want to advertise a service and a product, you go to this AD agency, fill a form, and that’s it: your ad will be show in the pool of sites using this AD agency.
But that automatic system brings the following problem: how do we make sure that the ad delivered to a site is the right one for the audience? The guy that wired the AD agency paid them to display his AD a set amount of times, and wants to make the most of it. That’s where tracking and behavior analysis comes into play.
Sounds pretty vanilla behavior harvesting. “Don’t do evil”, aged, by the way. (Blame Sun, Not Google).
Edited 2018-10-24 18:06 UTC
Stays at my computer (Specially if turned off).
With My Network agent, well…
😀