Nowadays, everything is for sale. Personal data, private information, virtual space, land on the moon and the list can go on with the most unexpected, resourceful methods of making money. People can now be sold anything, as the most popular and efficient way of making money in our modern times is through online advertising, apps and basically everything that has to do with the flexible, ever changing, progressive virtual space. The internet is one of the greatest money resources for everyone who owns a platform and wants to share it for a good price with those who have something for sale and are ready to pay a good price for promotion strategies.
Buying apps through official app stores should offer a security guarantee. This should mean that the app has been approved by a team of developers whose job is to suppress shady behavior. Unfortunately, ad fraud is on the rise and there are many slips through the cracks. According to a recent statistic, serving hundreds of unseen ads destroys both your battery life and data plan.
There is a quite extensive srudy revealing that many seemingly legitimate apps actually serve thousands of invisible ads on the background. This is not our usual pop-up and ad rate on a browser. The apps secretly serve 700 ads an hour, according to the recent research that has unveiled 12 million devices hijacked over a 10 day period.
These apps act like botnets that scam users and unfortunately they live in trusted app stores. They act like poison to the inner workings of your device, as within 24 hours of “contamination”, your phone will be both dead and drained of data. If you want to keep away from the poisonous behavior of such virtual structures, it is not enough to simply exit the app, as the ads are served right at the device start up and continue to do their dirty job after the app is closed.
There are thousands of mobile applications in Google Play and Apple’s app stores which mislead marketers by loading a “secret” range of adverts that cannot be seen by real people. This bug in the system costs business owners and promoters no less than $1 billion a year, as Forensiq states.
Advertising fraud is gaining pace and spreads from the web to the mobile app advertising market, to ultimately affect common users. The invisible apps secretly devour your data, hijack the work of well-intended marketers and “infect” the online market, stealing huge amounts of information and overcrowding the virtual space with illegitimate, abusive information.
These apps imitate human behavior to reduce the risk of detection by advertisers. The malicious pieces of software provide a very large amount of the ad space for sale in ad exchanges. Marketers are already losing $6 billion a year due to fraudulent traffic.
Image Source: scpr.org
