FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Tech

Forget Advertisers, Malicious Apps Are Eating Up Your Data

In an attempt to scam advertisers, crooked app makers are costing users money, too.

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.

Forensiq calculates that mobile advertisers are losing 13 percent of their ad budgets to fraud. That's a shame, and probably criminal, but there's a an even bigger point that the report treats as an afterthought. The activity that fuels this fraud can use up to 2GB of data a day. With the average cell phone data plan from the Big Four mobile companies costing $13.01 per GB, consumers are getting scammed proportionally harder than the advertisers.

The solution is clear, but won't be easy. Only download trusted apps with lots of reviews, don't allow apps permissions on your phone that don't make sense, and always browse on trusted W-Fi networks when possible. What about the advertisers? Someone should probably do something about that.