[HN Gopher] Photos and Video Taken Inside Illegal Click Farms (2...
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Photos and Video Taken Inside Illegal Click Farms (2018)
Author : thunderbong
Score : 111 points
Date : 2021-04-01 14:26 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.core77.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.core77.com)
| ab_testing wrote:
| And here I was thinking there would be pictures of animals being
| treated badly in farms -which the government passed a law to
| prevent journalists from taking pictures .
| munificent wrote:
| I know this is a loaded term, but I find it interesting that
| globalization plays a key role here. I would be surprised if the
| economics of click farms made sense without involving third-world
| employees generated ad revenue in first-world denominations.
|
| Better wages in those countries would likely eliminate fraud like
| this. It's essentially an arbitrage opportunity to buy first-
| world denominated "attention currency" at third world click farm
| worker attention prices.
| T-hawk wrote:
| Right. And one way to combat that is IP geolocation, show your
| ads only to a first world audience. Of course, then a VPN or
| other IP spoofing techniques will combat _that_.
| nitrogen wrote:
| A friend-of-a-friend supposedly bought a bunch of cheap Android
| phones and ran apps that pay you to watch ads. IIRC it was only
| worth a couple hundred bucks a month.
| bongoman37 wrote:
| A lot of people here are speculating on what makes this illegal.
| The vast majority of the times, this will not be pursued by
| anyone if the operation is small time. If the operation is large,
| the actual reason for going after them may be things like money
| laundering, running a botnet by having unauthorized access to a
| device or things like that.
|
| App developers can also achieve higher number of clicks by
| incentivizing users to click on ads by e.g., offering an extra
| life in a game if you click. This can drive up the click thru
| rate at the expense of lowering the rate of post click events.
| This is usually not allowed by advertisers but sometimes they are
| okay with it.
|
| Also, not everyone minds some fraud. VC driven companies may only
| care about clicks or new user sign ups, regardless of how good
| the users are because that's the metric they are targeting.
| cyberlab wrote:
| > VC driven companies may only care about clicks or new user
| sign ups, regardless of how good the users are because that's
| the metric they are targeting.
|
| That could bite them in the ass further down the road, when
| these bot farms are exposed by researchers. There was a few
| well researched bot farms on Twitter that are now defunct as
| Twitter dismantled them and now forces you to use a phone
| number to register an account, limiting attempts by people who
| want to create sockpuppet armies.
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| If you use the word "illegal" in the headline, it clearly shows
| your affiliation. Yes, these people don't comply with the ToS.
| Yes, they abuse the apps and don't use them as intended. Does it
| make their activities illegal? If so, at what point? Is having
| two Instagram accounts illegal? Two, five, fifty? Where is the
| threshold and who decides about it?
| rootsudo wrote:
| Illegal =/= Terms of service violation.
| aero-glide2 wrote:
| Different countries define "illegal" differently
| edrxty wrote:
| Sure, but the vast majority of HN is US based and it's very
| important here not to perpetuate any notion that corporate
| wish lists are synonymous with the force of law lest we make
| any of our problems worse.
| botwriter wrote:
| Subjective but I imagine an awful lot of those phones were moped
| snatched its rife in SEA. and probably the cheapest way to buy
| phones.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| got something new here? this is so old
|
| Discussion on the Thailand one:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14549291
|
| Footage/discussion from another one:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14430816
|
| Video of one in 2019:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20525356
|
| And further news discussion from around that time:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20488838
| newdude116 wrote:
| A buddy of mine does this for dating sites (don't ask).
| [deleted]
| some_random wrote:
| > They reported that they earned USD $2,950 to $4,400 per month,
| which comes out to $35,400 to $52,800 per year.
|
| I always find it surprising how little small illicit operations
| usually make. At the high end this is only barely more than the
| US minimum wage (between three people). Amazing for where they
| live, but awful in the grand scheme of things.
| paxys wrote:
| I think you are underselling the amount. $50K/yr is a fortune
| for the markets these operations run in (think random Thai
| towns/villages). It is approaching median wage for a family in
| a large US city.
| erdos4d wrote:
| I think the operative words here are "They reported". If you
| had a bunch of cops looking to extort you for a part of your
| operation's profits, how big would you make the pile out to be?
| alert0 wrote:
| I'm always surprised of the opposite when I see malware
| operations get busted with 8 figures of profit. Should have
| stopped at 7 figures and no one would notice.
| SkipperCat wrote:
| How hard is it to emulate an iPhone or Android so you can do this
| on a computer? I would think it would be a lot easier to do this
| with one PC instead of hundreds of tethered phones.
| bongoman37 wrote:
| I used to work on stopping this, its a cat and mouse game. Most
| datacenter IPs are already blacklisted, and this appears to be
| a low level fraud. But often it may be that you need physical
| actions also, e.g., an advertiser may pay for installing a game
| only if the player crosses the first level of a game. Either
| you build a bot which can do that or you use humans.
|
| Fraud goes all the way from simple operations where actual
| people in countries like India or Bangladesh are physically
| clicking on ads to sophisticated operations where bots generate
| human like traffic which is mixed with genuine traffic to avoid
| detection.
| [deleted]
| bredren wrote:
| How much did IP masking help in this situation versus the
| data analysis and identification of inauthentic use?
|
| Did you have any experience dealing with residential proxy
| networks? If so, can you give some examples of any
| mitigations to inbound requests from those connections?
| bongoman37 wrote:
| IP masking was applied very early but it did cut down a
| large number of requests, I am not sure how many though.
| Next were filters that would block devices sending more
| than a few hundred requests a minute or so on. These would
| be usually bots or compromised devices. Then we would look
| at cuts of traffic where the characteristics were outside
| of acceptable parameters and block those. E.g., say a
| particular OS, OS version, device model, request country
| etc. This could be made much more granular. If you see too
| high a CTR or too low a conversion rate, or abnormal time
| between ad being displayed and being clicked on (fraud
| clicks had a tighter distribution between request and click
| as compared to genuine clicks) or any other weird stuff,
| you could block that cut of traffic.
|
| Also, we refrained from calling it fraud, the term was
| invalid traffic. This also accounted for things like
| someone double tapping on an ad instead of once, and so on.
| There is a good report by Alexander Tuzhilin [1]
| commissioned by Google when they were sued for charging for
| invalid traffic that might give you some more ideas.
|
| [1] https://googleblog.blogspot.com/pdf/Tuzhilin_Report.pdf
| bserge wrote:
| It's doable, but I believe a bunch of old phones will come out
| cheaper (including on electricity cost) and more reliable
| (being proper devices in the eyes of ad networks, and having
| fewer crashes).
|
| A 4 core i7 CPU + 32GB of RAM will run 4-8 Android machines,
| maybe a couple more. You can get 10 Android phones for ~$700.
| gruez wrote:
| >A 4 core i7 CPU
|
| What year do you live in? These days even i3s come with 4
| cores.
| bserge wrote:
| 2014, the last year Intel made any _good_ improvements to
| their ancient architecture.
|
| Just ignore the "i7" part if it confuses you. I've not had
| a desktop in over a decade, so I'm talking about mobile
| chips 90% of the time.
| saddestcatever wrote:
| True. I think the economics of how cheap smartphones have
| gotten is shocking.
|
| Especially since you can acquire "barely working" phones.
| Broken camera? Not a problem. Broken audio jack? No worries.
| Cracked screen? Meh. No battery life? Doesn't matter one bit.
|
| I imagine it's pretty easy to acquire hundreds of barely
| working phone for cheap if you don't care about using them as
| a traditional mobile device.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Or buy working devices and harvest the unneeded parts for
| resale.
|
| Can buy a used MacBook Air, sell the lcd assembly and
| keyboard/trackpad and already recover a big chunk of the
| cost. (If you needed an Apple device).
| banana_giraffe wrote:
| And once you start looking to acquire hundreds of phones,
| you can buy a lot of old phones on ebay or the like for
| something like $1 a phone or less. Most probably won't
| work, but at scale, you'll end up with enough that are good
| enough for something like a click farm.
| ac29 wrote:
| Why would an emulated phone need 4-8GB of RAM? A $70 phone
| probably only has 1 or 2 GB.
| bserge wrote:
| Worst case scenario overhead. Aka my normal situation,
| because I'm too lazy to use solutions better than
| Bluestacks on Windows :D
| cyberlab wrote:
| > How hard is it to emulate an iPhone or Android
|
| Check out Correlium https://corellium.com/
|
| They operate in a sort of legal grey-area since you're not
| 'supposed' to emulate iOS so if you decide to use it, keep in
| mind it could all be shut down at a moments notice.
| monocasa wrote:
| Better than legal grey area, as they won Apple's suit against
| them.
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/12/29/apple-c.
| ..
| avidiax wrote:
| Rather difficult without an insider at Apple and Google. The
| fraud detection systems used are based on dozens of checks. I
| doubt even these real phones pass, since they likely have low
| uptime, they have never been in a landscape orientation or face
| down, few system settings are customized, etc.
|
| At least Android provides a public API to measure
| trustworthiness, but if you are in the business of selling
| clicks you may also be in the business of turning a blind eye
| to fraudulent activity that makes you money.
| bredren wrote:
| I know a person who runs a bot on a social media app that
| does the follow / unfollow routine to boost an account.
| They've had this running for a few years.
|
| At first I assumed it was conservative enough to fly under
| the radar. However, now that this network is so big, the
| pattern of this fraudulent behavior must be unmistakable. It
| is so simple.
|
| The only conclusion I can draw is that the network is well
| aware of these bots, and so long as they don't draw negative
| attention, they are actually boosting "engagement" as the
| likes / follows do cause events that trigger people into
| revisiting the product--and ultimately reaching goals.
| ykevinator wrote:
| In 3 party systems 2 of the parties benefit from fraud, that's
| why there's only the appearance of enforcement.
| r3trohack3r wrote:
| > Police got wind and arrested them
|
| I understand how this breaks ToS, but how was this illegal?
| renewiltord wrote:
| They were Chinese nationals who were 'working' in Thailand
| without a permit. That's why immigration police arrested them.
|
| Of course, the police then thought they were running call
| center scams (which are illegal there) until they came clean
| about the operation.
|
| The reason they were in Thailand is that there's less scrutiny
| there on SIM cards and low smartphone fees. Ultimately, though,
| KYC requirements do exist on Thai pre-paid plans (post-paid
| plans are effectively user-tied anyway) so they also got hit by
| the smuggling SIMs charge.
|
| Ultimately, lots of illegal stuff going on. Just not where
| you'd expect.
| peterkelly wrote:
| Some details about the SIM cards they were using here:
|
| https://www.bangkokpost.com/thailand/general/1272351/nbtc-
| al...
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Offering someone a paid service to increase engagement on
| social media, and then doing that by having people in click
| farms to increase the engagement metric without actually
| increasing engagement is fraud. Of course it's illegal.
| dooglius wrote:
| Who says the click farm was offering such a service? It seems
| to me the offer is clicking things repetitively for money.
| You can argue that in some cases the farm was an accessory to
| fraud in that it knew or should have known its clients were
| engaging in fraud (e.g. if the client is the app owner), is
| that what you're getting at?
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > Who says the click farm was offering such a service?
|
| Why else do you think they were doing it? They just really
| like clicking things?
| dylan604 wrote:
| What makes these illegal? It's not some bot network being run
| from unsuspecting device owners. These are actual humans
| operating devices clicking on specific things they were told to
| do. Why has this crossed from gaming the system to illegal?
|
| It's shady as shit, don't get me wrong, but why illegal? It's
| like the old "enter as often" type of games. The rules were
| followed, but the "spirit" of the rules was not.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| I'm not familiar with Chinese or Thai law to know what is legal
| or not, but I would assume there is some kind of fraud.
| Especially for clicking on advertisements.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Is it fraudulent to click on advertisements without having an
| intention to buy the product?
| junon wrote:
| I would imagine it's something like this:
|
| 1. You create an AdWords account or something where you can
| be paid to put ads on your site.
|
| 2. You have tons of employees with different devices,
| probably on a range of VPNs or tor circuits.
|
| 3. They click ads on your site over and over and over
| again.
|
| Just a hunch. I know this sort of thing is strictly
| forbidden in Google's terms and can certainly be considered
| fraudulent depending on who's asking.
| [deleted]
| ars wrote:
| It's not fraudulent for the _clicker_. It 's fraudulent for
| the website host who _hired_ the clicker.
|
| The host presumably has some kind of contract they agreed
| to in exchange for getting ads and getting paid.
| EMM_386 wrote:
| This would depend on the country I'd imagine, but in the
| United States the answer seems to be "yes".
|
| That would be when the company doing the clicking is
| profiting off of it, which in this case they are.
|
| https://www.cheq.ai/click-fraud-illegal
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| _Is it fraudulent to click on advertisements without having
| an intention to buy the product?_
|
| I dont know, but I doubt intention to buy is the deciding
| factor. I would think that it becomes illegal when you are
| misrepresenting traffic to an advertiser. Especially if its
| a pay per click contract, and the group doing the clicking
| is acting on behalf of the company getting paid.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| Misrepresenting traffic to an advertiser _is_ intention.
| Those clicks were intended to defraud the advertiser.
| Normal clicks from average joe are not done intending to
| defraud somebody.
|
| It might be pedantic to point that out... but intent
| matters.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| Right, but I was being even more pedantic when I quoted
| "intention to buy." That is to say, if I see an ad for
| something that I want to know more about, but I don't
| want or need, or cant afford, I have an honest reason to
| click on the ad even though I don't have an "intention to
| buy."
| [deleted]
| wincy wrote:
| I mean, AdNauseam [0] certainly has that intention, as it
| clicks every single ad in an attempt to waste advertisers
| time and money.
|
| [0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
| US/firefox/addon/adnauseam/
| cies wrote:
| I dont know if intent by itself (without an otherwise
| punishable act) can be a crime. That would be a thought
| crime, wouldn't it?
|
| GP says "Click without intend to buy" -- Wow, that sounds
| like mis clicks could be a CRIME!
|
| I cannot be too bothered with people gaming the sleazy
| business that advertising is.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| _I dont know if intent by itself (without an otherwise
| punishable act) can be a crime. That would be a thought
| crime, wouldn 't it?_
|
| Intent can surely make something a crime, that wouldn't
| be punishable otherwise. Giving someone with a peanut
| allergy something with peanuts in it is not a crime,
| unless you knew they had the allergy and intended to hurt
| them. In some states it's illegal to intentionally expose
| someone to HIV, but it wouldnt be illegal to expose them
| if you didn't know you had it. If you slip and fall at a
| store you can likely sue for damages, but it would be a
| crime if you intended to do it.
|
| _I cannot be too bothered with people gaming the sleazy
| business that advertising is._
|
| Yeah, I don't feel bad for any of the players involved in
| that world.
| michaelbuckbee wrote:
| I accidently click an ad -> not a crime.
|
| I hire you to browse around my site clicking on ads to
| generate revenue for me -> crime.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Lock me up. I have never bought via a clicked ad. Every
| click was accidental. I would eat a hotdog from a shady
| vendor in a back alley before buying anything from a banner
| ad.
| Rule35 wrote:
| No. Without an existing obligation, not at all.
|
| But if you're the same party displaying the ads, or working
| for them, then yes - you're intentionally defrauding the ad
| company.
| peterkelly wrote:
| At this scale, yes. If you pay me (say) $30,000 for
| advertising based on a commitment from me that your ads
| will be shown to enough people until you reach a certain
| number of click-throughs, but actually all of those are
| just my staff sitting there repeatedly clicking on them all
| day without ever buying your product, i'm pretty sure you'd
| be unhappy about that.
|
| Whether it's actually illegal or not is another matter, and
| depends on circumstances and jurisdiction.
| mc32 wrote:
| Isn't it like being a radio station with 5,000 listeners
| but claiming to have 50,000 listeners and charging
| advertisers on the basis of having 50,000 listeners?
| T-hawk wrote:
| Not quite, because in this case the 50,000 listeners do
| exist. It's just that 45,000 of them are shills paid by
| the radio station. But if the advertising contracts
| didn't exclude for that, then there's no grounds to
| complain.
| happytoexplain wrote:
| "Intention to buy" isn't specific enough. If it can be
| defined as obtaining money by deception, which seems like a
| pretty applicable description, the case for fraud seems
| strong.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Why do you think the people working in these click farms
| are clicking on the adverts?
|
| Is it to defraud someone out of a marketing fee by
| pretending that your adverts are creating more engagement
| than they actually are?
|
| Then that's fraud, isn't it?
|
| The law looks at how a reasonable person would interpret
| what you are doing and what your intent is. It doesn't work
| on a 'clicking adverts without intending to buy is illegal'
| basis. So many people here misunderstand that.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| Whose law? The US? Thailand? China?
|
| In western common law practice, sure. But elsewhere?
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Yes I think an equivalent 'fraud' law, sometimes called
| something like obtaining a valuable security or pecuniary
| advantage by by deception or something like that, is a
| basic part of almost all legal system everywhere.
| guest2112 wrote:
| >The men, identified as Wang Dong, Niu Bang and Ni Wenjin, were
| charged with working without a permit and importing the phones
| without paying taxes.
|
| https://www.presstv.com/DetailFr/2017/06/13/525171/Thailand-...
|
| So nothing about the farm, they just didn't pay their bribes.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| If its used solely by advertising resellers to defraud their
| publishers?
| Black101 wrote:
| I wonder if everyone would click just for fun how it would
| modify the ad business....
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > What makes these illegal?
|
| It's fraud.
| ldoughty wrote:
| Typically websites make agreements that advertisement networks
| will pay for the clicks.. if that website did so with the
| intention of "gaming the system", then they are in breech of
| contact, and typically there's a law somewhere that covers
| entering into bad faith contracts with the intent to take money
| without providing legitimate services...
| cies wrote:
| Making paid 5-stars and upvotes is not done under business
| contract but under consumer "terms of service" right?
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