Google has banned apps running ad fraud schemes. These fraudulent apps had more than 56 million downloads. In this fraud scheme, instead of stealing data or damaging the device, the fraudsters keep collecting payments from advertisers by showing fake users.
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Google Removed Over 180 Fake Apps: Tech company Google has removed a lot of apps from its Play Store. Google has banned apps running ad fraud schemes. These fraudulent apps had more than 56 million downloads. This caused losses to users, advertisers and app developers. According to a Forbes report, the tech giant tried to control this problem by releasing a security patch to fix the issue.
But these efforts did not completely solve the problem, so Google had no other option but to remove these fraudulent apps from the Play Store.
This is how the new ad fraud works
Let us tell you that the ad fraud scheme is different from common malware. In this fraud scheme, instead of stealing data or damaging the device, the fraudsters keep taking payments from advertisers by showing fake users to them.
These fake interactions make it look like ads are being shown to real users, when they are not. In some cases, users do see the ads, but seeing too many ads ruins the user’s app experience, which in turn leads to a poor app rating on the Play Store.
The fraudsters behind this plan created deceptive apps and displayed them in popular categories. Users would unknowingly download these apps, and then get bombarded with unnecessary apps. It also managed to bypass Google Play Protect, which is Android’s integrated security feature to protect against harmful apps. So if you have any such apps on your phone, uninstall or delete them immediately.
