Forget Advertisers, Malicious Apps Are Eating Up Your Data

So it turns out that a significant amount of mobile app designers are using clever trickery to scam advertisers out of millions of dollars a year. Forensiq, a security company that monitors advertising fraud, released a report today that estimates that advertisers could stand to lose up to $857 million to fraud this year alone. More important than that, however, is that users are being harmed too.

There are a couple ways this particular fraud is happening. In their report, Forensiq identified thousands of mobile apps that are exhibiting behavior meant to artificially inflate their activity. They run in the background on phones without users knowing, request permissions from phone operating systems that they don’t need, and display ads at such a rapid rate— as fast as 20 ads per minute— in the background that users couldn’t possibly notice them. What’s the point of these techniques? To scam advertisers by displaying hundreds of ads to anyone who downloads their apps, regardless of whether users see the ads or not. Advertisers are then shelling out millions for ads that don’t get seen and only last for a second.