8 votes

Ordinary Americans are using armies of phones to generate extra income for beer, diapers, and bills through ad fraud

Posted by Diet_Coke
Tags: advertising, incentivized traffic, automation, fraud, phone farms, scams, usa, author.joseph cox, author.annabel gat, source.motherboard
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/d3naek/how-to-make-a-phone-farm

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Title
Americans Are Making Phone Farms to Scam Free Money From Advertisers
Published
Aug 1 2019
Word count
2511 words

4 comments

  1. Diet_Coke
    Link

    Joseph D'Alesandro, 20, made nearly $2,000 a month from phone farming back in 2017, he told Motherboard in a phone call. In eighth or ninth grade, D'Alesandro found one of the apps popular with farmers and started running it on his main phone. Slowly over a few years, he built up his farm, expanding to more and more devices.

    4 votes
  2. [2]
    Omnicrola
    Link
    All of this has happened before, and all this shall happen again. Back in the early 2000s there was a brief time where you could download ad bars that sat at the bottom of your desktop. Some...

    All of this has happened before, and all this shall happen again.

    Back in the early 2000s there was a brief time where you could download ad bars that sat at the bottom of your desktop. Some company would pay you to watch ads, people came up with ways to exploit it, eventually the time/profit trade-off wasn't worth it and it just kind of faded out. Now with the incredible prevalence if mobile devices, it's back. It too will eventually fade away.

    1 vote
    1. Diet_Coke
      Link Parent
      Towards the end of the article, it seems like it may have already - or at least become more difficult. I imagine there's a somewhat symbiotic relationship between the companies running the apps...

      Towards the end of the article, it seems like it may have already - or at least become more difficult. I imagine there's a somewhat symbiotic relationship between the companies running the apps and phone farmers. As long as there aren't too many of them, phone farmers boost user numbers and appear to boost engagement.

      3 votes
  3. DonQuixote
    Link
    Bring back the commons.

    Bring back the commons.

    2 votes