Americans Are Making Phone Farms To Scam Free Money From Advertisers (vice.com) 94
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Netflix thought I was four different people. I was being paid through an app to watch its trailers over and over again, racking up digital points I could eventually trade for Amazon gift cards or real cash. But rather than just use my own phone, I bought four Android devices to churn through the trailers simultaneously, bringing in more money. I made a small "phone farm," able to fabricate engagement with advertisements and programs from companies like Netflix, as well as video game trailers, celebrity gossip shows, and sports too. No one was really watching the trailers, but Netflix didn't need to know that. The goal was to passively run these phones 24/7, with each collecting a fraction of a penny for each ad they "watched."
Hobbyists and those looking to make a bit of money across the U.S. have been doing the same, buying dozens or hundreds of phones to generate revenue so they can afford some extra household goods, cover a bill, buy a case of beer, or earn more income without driving for Uber or delivering for Grubhub. The farms are similar to those found overseas, often in China, where rows and rows of phones click and scroll through social media or other apps to simulate the engagement of a real human. Every few months, a video of these Chinese farms goes viral, but in bedroom cupboards, stacks in corners of living rooms, or custom setups in their garage, American phone farmers are doing a similar thing, albeit on a smaller scale. Motherboard spoke to eight people who run farms of various sizes, most of whom are located in the U.S.
Hobbyists and those looking to make a bit of money across the U.S. have been doing the same, buying dozens or hundreds of phones to generate revenue so they can afford some extra household goods, cover a bill, buy a case of beer, or earn more income without driving for Uber or delivering for Grubhub. The farms are similar to those found overseas, often in China, where rows and rows of phones click and scroll through social media or other apps to simulate the engagement of a real human. Every few months, a video of these Chinese farms goes viral, but in bedroom cupboards, stacks in corners of living rooms, or custom setups in their garage, American phone farmers are doing a similar thing, albeit on a smaller scale. Motherboard spoke to eight people who run farms of various sizes, most of whom are located in the U.S.
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reminds me of alladvantage back in the day. install a browser bar, get paid a small amount to surf.
with some crafty 3rd party plugins it became possible to install 15/20 of these bars.
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SEX FARM (Score:1)
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SEX FARM
Spinal Tap's [google.com] lawyers have issued a take down notice for your post.
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Now that it has been posted here, I expect that source of revenue will dry up quick. Why can't people keep their damn fool mouths shut?
Because people committing fraud is interesting?
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Because people committing fraud is interesting?
Yes, of course it is. That's a silly question.
It has been a long tradition to keep track of how these companies break the law, or buy laws to make their immoral actions legal, followed by people finding ways to carry out morally right actions that used to be illegal in a legal way, or finding new not-yet-illegal ways to behave morally.
Looking at your posting history, there are plenty of articles relating to people and companies committing fraud you have posted on, and at least two I checked were not you c
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Not to worry, when I first heard of this a few years ago I was already late to the party, the golden age of phone farming is but a distant memory.
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If this can convince the companies who invest in advertising that they are just wasting their money it could lead to less add in the world. This would make it a better place.
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My neighbor across the hall in college got so good at winning radio station call-in prizes he had to start using fake names and his relatives' addresses.
The gimmick wasn't 10 phone lines, but simply writing down the schedules of the announcements. It turned out the promotions were all pretty well scheduled and it was just a question of timing the phone call.
But this was the early 1980s -- analog phone lines, no caller ID, no way for them to use screening more sophisticated than answering the phone.
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Energy efficiency? (Score:5, Insightful)
Presumably it costs more to watch the ads than they're actually worth. It costs pennies to show an ad, time alone costs more. Unless these ads are insanely expensive per view I don't see where it makes money.
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Lol - the amount of effort required and the amount posted earned - with the hassle of figuring out the next app / configuration, etc?
No thanks - I'll have a real job and value my free time.
Costly Phones? (Score:2, Insightful)
These are old pieces of trash that cost about $50 if they're not stolen. It's a great use for stolen phones with an unusable IMEI.
Re:Energy efficiency? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Or just recycling old phones they have bought in the past. I have friends draws full of old phones. Nothing wrong with them, they are just no longer updated and or old. They work fine.
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Any particular reason you keep old phones in your friend's underwear?
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A typical cheap android phone is around 20-30 USD. For example, Mobicel Astro.
Hint: don't search using Western search engines without specific qualifiers. They'll mainly feed you "cheap" phones aimed at Western markets, which are around 100-120 USD if you get a good search, and closer to 200 if you're not. Look for phones meant for South Asian and African "shithole country" markets. You'll find a lot of phones in the 20-30 USD range, because that's what's most popular there and is sold in volumes of tens to
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Why? I don't understand, why?
Why would you install racks of phones when a single PC can run hundreds of emulators far more easily for lower cost and far far lower maintenance?
This just doesn't make any sense at all.
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If they are using WiFi for cheaper internet access, then a VM farm would be a lot smarter, and it would be easier to manage because you don't need 80 cell phone chargers, and 20 power strips to make them work.
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I would worry that the upstream IP commonality would raise flags. You'd think anything tied to affiliate or pay-per-click would be looking for that. It's a pretty simple way to weed out the less sophisticated operators.
The effort and knowledge to defeat this -- say a bunch of VPN accounts at different providers, policy routing to keep it all sorted, etc, probably exceeds the value of the reward, unless you've got other parallel scams running that can exploit this same setup.
I mean you can probably even au
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You would probably be surprised how few instances of phone emulators a PC can run. For years now Android has required 1GB of RAM minimum. Each instance needs to be decoding video, and the emulators are all competing for one GPU's hardware acceleration or just loading up the CPU.
Even assuming their software didn't bother to detect the emulated environment, you probably couldn't run all that many instances on even a fairly high end PC. Considering used phones capable of running this software are nearly free,
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One farmer said they do sometimes virtualize phones on their PC, but due to how resource intensive that can be on the computer, it works out as more cost effective to have a selection of cheap phones instead.
Does anyone remember Alladvantage (Score:3, Informative)
In 1999 you could download browser toolbar called 'Alladvantage' that paid you to browse the internet with it running. There was a program called fakesurfer that would cycle through websites and move the mouse around. I made like $500 running it when I was away from the computer before they issued an update that detected that kind of thing.
Not how I do it (Score:1, Troll)
I do it through VMs running Android with Google Voice numbers. No need for physical phones. I make a bit extra on top of my $50,000 I make in IT in San Jose.
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Nah, I use AWS instances for it. I make about $150 per day.
Do they get benefits and stuff? (Score:1, Insightful)
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And bailing out the inbred meth crybaby snowflakes in red states from their self-imposed financial and educational poverty... leading the way for America to follow, whether uneducated redneck deplorable trash likes it or not...
When you look at the entire picture (Score:2)
I have to wonder if these people are actually making money. I mean, the guy in the summary "bought four Android devices" to do this - has he even covered that expense? What about the cost of the electricity used by the devices? And did they have to change phone plans to accommodate the extra bandwidth being used?
People sometimes work stupidly hard for the purpose of avoiding work... I'd also offer the corollary people sometimes spend lots of money for the purpose of making a smaller amount of money.
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You clearly don't understand how this would work. That is why you are not making any money from it. You can buy 4 of reasonably recent phones on ebay for $50 and you don't need to pay for service. If you want a number you can get H20 wireless sim card for almost nothing and activate it. You will have a working phone for under $20 with the phone number. Then you can use wifi and plug the phones into charger and leave them plugged in. Install automation software and off you go. In fact android provides click
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Or you could make about 12X that amount doing something worthwhile that you actually enjoy
I enjoy baiting advertising goons.
The next version of the App will use the camera (Score:2)
To study the emotions of the person watching the trailer. And to ensure that there is a person there.
There is no escape from AI.
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It would have to be a picture that moved in 3 dimensions like a human.
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It'll be an arms race (Score:2)
It'll be a race between AI good enough to detect fakes, and AIs good enough to pump fakes into the camera.
The goal was to passively run these phones 24/7 (Score:4, Interesting)
The goal was to passively run these phones 24/7
Yeah. If anyone bothered to check, you'd KNOW that something wasn't right.
Years ago I read an article about Germany. They were promoting and subsiding solar energy to bootstrap it, fine. But they ran across one company they were paying that was producing solar power at night. They went out to see how this amazing feat was being done just to find running diesel generators. Not quite what they had in mind.
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Isn't diesel solar power, just on a longer time scale?
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All power is either nuclear or geothermal. Remember the TMBG song about the sun!
Hundreds of phones (Score:2)
Also means hundreds of radio devices transmitting at the same time within the same smallish area.
It's smart from the health point of view!
Easiest way to verify impression authenticity (Score:1)
If the app hosting your advertisement immediately gets defocused, shut down, and also possibly uninstalled, the impression is legit. Otherwise, it's just a parasite running a phone farm.
engagement with advertisements (Score:2)
If your business is paying for online advertising and it is not restricted to ads directly in the search engine, then your engagement numbers are fully fictional.