According to the latest reports, the tech giant Google has removed six well-known apps from the Google Play Store simply for committing ad fraud. All these applications merely run in the background and generate fake clicks on advertisements.
Google: Immediately Remove These 6 Apps From Your Smartphone
The tech giant Google has removed six well-known apps from one more Chinese Developer from the Play Store for committing ad fraud. And this time, the company involved is the DU Group, divided by the giant Baidu, which still holds a 34% stake in the company.
The most exciting thing is that the most popular Selfie Camera on the list had 50 million downloads in the Android app store, of course, Google Play Store. The DU Group is not the first to get involved in this scheme, as in November 2018, Cheetah Mobile’s Android apps, like Clean Master and Battery Doctor, were charged with fraud.
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All these applications run in the background and generate fake clicks on advertisements, causing advertiser harm and fraudulent revenue to the developer.
According to the well-known media portal, of course, I am talking about BuzzFeed, at least six DU Group applications make fraudulent clicks on ads, and here they are Selfie Camera, Total Cleaner, Smart Cooler, RAM Master, AIO Flashlight and Omni Cleaner.
Among all these six apps, five apps have more than 10 million downloads each. While the apps, which have been downloaded more than 90 million times, are now no longer available in the Google Play Store.
The application development team documented fraud, as one of the codes “verified that the user had not yet clicked on an ad and then clicked at random intervals.” As the clicks happened even when the application was not open, the device’s battery and data could be consumed more quickly.
Apart from committing fraud, the applications also asked for invasive permissions. The well-known app AIO Flashlight, whose only function is to act as a flashlight, requests 31 permissions and seven of which were considered dangerous, simply for providing access to sensitive data.
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While if you compare this app with the other apps available in the Play Store, you will find that they only need two permissions to work. Another feature of the DU Group applications is that the privacy policy was hosted on random pages on Tumblr, like “dreamilyswimmingwizard.tumblr.com” or “superiorzzr.tumblr.com”.
However, in a note, the tech giant Google stated that it has removed fraudulent apps from the Play Store and blocked them. Hence, as a result, they will no longer be able to generate revenue from ads on the Google AdMob platform. So, what do you think about this? Share all your views and thoughts in the comment section below. And if you liked this post, do not forget to share this post with your friends and family.
