Click farms: a shadowy internet industry is booming in China
yahoo.com
yahoo.com
"Hey man, I'm just trying to feed my family. I have kids so that means I can behave however I want so long as it benefits my kids. And rather than trust some reviews on a platform anyone can sign up for, how about you do some reading on the app developer and their ToS and Privacy Policy."
I'm adamantly opposed to spam, and back in the early days of the web (say, 1996 or so) I'd call up spammers and politely ask them to stop. Quite a number of people were just confused or oblivious; they would often take my suggestions to heart. But a lot of them were in some sort of scarcity panic like this guy is. They had bills to pay, mouths to feed! If what they did harmed other people, well, they weren't going to think too hard about that.
One of the real tragedies of this is how circular it is, how self-sustaining. Why is this person so desperate? Often it's because a) other desperate people are doing shitty things to them, or b) entirely non-desperate people have rigged things so that there are enough desperate people harnessed to make sure those on top get and stay rich.
We can divide all economic activity into value creation and wealth extraction. Things like click farming do extract wealth, but they increase systemic waste, meaning less value can be produced. That in turn increases the amount of desperation, making people more likely to join them in doing something exploitative just to survive.
It all seems so pathological. I wish we were better at breaking these cycles.
If there's a comment that's [dead] that shouldn't be, you should vouch for it by clicking on its timestamp and then clicking 'vouch' at the top of its page. When enough users vouch for a comment, it is restored to visibility. That's why the comment you're talking about is now visible (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20495142), albeit also downvoted.
Specifically, in the same country, fake reviews are a real issue. I ended up in way too many shady restaurants and dealt with way too many dodgy businesses with 5 star reviews thanks to click / review farms to know that this type of business is actually criminal. I am now at a stage where I simply don't trust reviews anymore.
The problem with restaurants, being an overall shady business, is probably that way too many customers are too easy to please or hard to please, so the reviews doesn't say much.
Increasing popularity never made anything better.
So I worked on online web dev jobs for some seriously shady characters.
I made between 10 and 15 sites that they would buy databases and mass mail users in various industries to try and get them to sign up for really shitty programs. (One for example was a roofing company promising 100's of clients).
The amount of work I did on the back end to track everything about the users, fingerprint them and send a report about where in the multipage process they were up to and what they had filled in (but not submitted!) was crazy.
My point being, I hated every single moment of that. But I needed to get money for my family.
If I had it had a good offer that required spamming forums and bypassing bot catchers, I would have done that too.
Sometimes you are in a position where you have to weigh your family's needs vs the general good.
One last point, or reiteration. I hated every. Single. Moment. And I am ashamed that I was in that position by my own fault (not picking a more secure job). I won't blame anyone else for it and I agree I did a bad thing. But if I was in that situtation again, I would do it again.
I get the sense that if it pays really well and is for a large company it’s not often judged, in fact it’s amazing, but if it’s for a smaller company with a less clear business model then it seems shady?
How do we sure that up? In our technical morality brains?
My mind didn't even think to ask it as I was reading the GPs comment and thinking about that small company as scummy.
It's easier to assign blame and judge morals the smaller the group is, all the way down to an individual. You can put a face to the crime.
E.g. paying property taxes for schools vs. federal tax dollars allocated to defense spending. School levies can get particularly heated and draw lots of activism on both sides while the same doesn't seem to hold for defense spending. [this is USA specific]
OK, I'm just going to come out and say it: I'd do it as well. And I cound my blessings often (not every day, though I should) that I don't need to, and unless the world changes massively and high-level experienced software devs are no longer needed, I'll never need to.
If you had ended up being charged for spamming, hacking into bot catchers, breaking data protection laws (like GDPR if you live in EU), would you accept that as a acceptable consequence and still have done it to get money for the family? Or would you think that is unfair?
This crossroad is for me the line where social support networks should exist. If people find crime to be the only solution in a situation and the legal repercussions to be a fair trade then it is cheaper and more humane to fix the original situation. Your wife's country of birth should support her while she is unable to work because of the pregnancy, and the child should be supported similarly as long they are a child.
I would have setup a way not to be caught.
It would be criminal, (this was pre-gdpr it definitely would be now), but I would have done it still.
She was supported to an extent, but we knew once she had our son, we wouldn't be able to keep up with necessities. We needed to start buying things then and there.
Well yes there was some risk involved. but gamblers fallacy and all that.
This is not an accusation — I don't claim to know your individual situation. Yet I suspect that in many cases where people say "I'm doing this to feed my family", there is actually a larger component of preserving pride and reluctance to ask for help.
The irony is that this is part of what dehumanizes the system and perpetuates the cycle.
Even if they weren't trying to BS you, people committing crimes often come up with some sort of story to justify the whole thing. People like to be the hero of their story.
Or you start small and grow.
Or you borrow money to start.
Or you find an angel investor who is rich.
Etc.
Kind of like any other start up really.
If you can get business loans and financing, that's just another version of not exactlty being poor.
They run 3rd party apps on their phones which automate whole process and they get some percent of profit. I imagine that when they grow they can start working for themselves.
The people who are good at spam - the folks topping Google search results for lucrative phrases or spamming social media on an industrial scale - all tend to have a lot of money.
A business built on spam (or illegal tactics) is, by nature, unstable. You're one bust away from losing all your income.
So the people who enter this space either tend to have so much money that they don't mind losing an income source. Or they have so little money that they spam in desperation
Perhaps these click farms are just an evolving reaction to the PITA that is online advertising. It's the advertising industry that gets harmed by it and not some other poor people and it should eventually lead to more transparency for their customers, who would like to compare their traffic with what the adtech provider logged and isolate the fraudulent clicks.
No, the users aren't. The advertisers are, they evaluate the performance of their advertising and find it less worthwhile as fraud increases.
Life is chaotic and messy and that is often hard thing for us to accept. Ecosystems that endure find a way to balance these competing forces.
And so far Google etc have decided it’s better to tolerate this to some extent than spend the money to eradicate it, which is often the pragmatic choice.
Well, a private company created an arbitrary system with arbitrary rules to make them gobs of cash, and now the entire world should "work within it"? Why? Personally I don't run an ad-blocker out of principle, so maybe I'm a bit more sensitive than the average person here since I get exposed to this garbage everyday.
Google also wants to "cheat" the system by not hiring any actual humans to actually make sure that people aren't tricked with ads for dick pills with heavy metals or protein power that is toxic or ads about payday loans or whatever other crazy scam-ads people run. Google wants to automate everything and leave the rest of us wading in this garbage. How about hiring people to fix the mess they created instead of stuffing their pockets? I'm only mentioning Google here, but I don't want to necessarily single them out, all of the web advertising platforms are responsible in someway or another. Its just that Google is an easy target since they are the largest ...
>I’m not making a value judgement here.
Um.. I believe the use of word parasite precludes you from making any such claim :)
Talking about parasites can explain what is happening, and point us in the direction of solutions. But is must never be used to justify.
Given that people are what they are, I want us to get better at breaking these cycles. But very often, statements like "there will always be people willing to break the rules" are used to act as if things like the number of people willing to break the rules and the amount of harm done when rules are broken are beyond our control.
These schemes to make money without doing ordinary boring dull work are ofent a waste of time if you compare your hourly wage to whatever you would get carrying bags of seed up the hill to the sawmill.
A programmer that is competent enough to write spamscripts is competent enough to work as a programmer.
Only if competence were the only measure you'd need to get a job. In reality, there are various other factors like: Where one lives, how good one is at interviewing and so on.
What could they possibly gain from ruining the economy and keeping others poor. This seems to be based on a very poor understanding of how economics works, or the idea that there are secret nation-wide power systems plotting evil things like a rich villain in a Disney movie.
Just like some companies make decisions for the benefit of the next quarter, rather than the next 5 years. If you are able to make a decision that increases near term metrics, at the expense of some other metric you aren't even paying attention to (like making poor people poorer) I can see that happening independently thousands of times a day.
Take payday loans, more commonly used by people with a lower socio-economic standing. They aren't there to create an underclass, they are there to provide a service (loans) at a cost that matches the risk (ignoring the conversation about the cost not matching the risk due to predatory loans). But if decisions are made to increase profit from payday loans, a natural consequence is that the underclass is going to be made more of an underclass.
This is just one example, and it's clearly got some issues. I have no problem imagining many other decisions that will help create an underclass. Maybe the impact is 2 or 5 steps removed, but each one makes a difference, and leads to in aggregate "the rich work to keep the poor, poor".
But what do I know. I'm a developer who took one econ course.
There's plenty of historical evidence for this. For example: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2007/aug/28/commen...
The counterargument is that the massive increases in wealth inequality since the 50s - a time when the average single wage earner could afford a relatively secure lifestyle - "just happened", which is obviously rather implausible.
Warren Buffet
It's not that implausible. It's the effect of technology - not just automation / computers (only since 90s or something) but also before, we had information technology - ever since the telegraph was invented. In simple terms, it enables ever-increasing scale of human cooperation, bigger countries, bigger companies etc. so the "winners" (smartest, most experienced, most educated, most corrupt, most sociopathic, most networked, or simply those with a better starting point) win ever more, at a bigger scale.
I also wouldn't think a conspiracy is necessary. Just lobby to write tax, tariff, and property laws out in the open that benefit one class of people/industry more than another.
1 of 5 children of John D Rockefeller (richest man in history) died at 13 months. In the past 130 years, child mortality has decreased massively in the developed world. If that's not "real" or "satisfying" and the only achievement that truly fulfils you is beating other people, that's a fairly sad life to live.
Also the experiment of being given the choice of either getting nothing or getting $X and giving their worst enemy 2*$X. Small groups often compete against each other, "keeping up with the Joneses", and while it is a sort of hedonistic treadmill, it's an easy way to gain satiety.
Equally there’s the possibility of some of the rich not really understanding this or not buying into this philosophy- look at some of the countries with increasing inequality and a disappearing middle class and you’ll always find some lobbying against spending money on services - including things like education which serve as an economic common good and which drive the economy over the long term.
If rich people are trying to maximize absolute societal wealth, you'd be right.
However, if they're trying to maximize absolute individual wealth, then they have plenty of incentive to exploit people. Labor history is full of this. If my workers aren't my customers and the choice is between putting a dollar in my pocket or a dollar in theirs, then a wealth-maximizer is going to take the dollar every time. Does that mean less global wealth? Very often. Does an individual absolute wealth maximizer care? Not at all.
People, though, are primates. Dominance hierarchies are part of our evolutionary history. We don't just care about absolute wealth. We care about social status. For many, power is its own end. Power and its signifiers. E.g., positional goods are hugely appealing to some people. (As a great historical example, consider the Shakespeare-style lace ruff collar. It was the height of fashion when it was handmade. As soon as machine-made lace became possible, they went out of fashion because they no longer reliably indicated wealth.) For these people, what matters is individual relative wealth.
For some people, yes, the exact desired outcome is them being on top and everybody else well down below. Does that mean they are less absolutely wealthy? Sure. Do they care? No. For evidence, just look at the historically enormous number of kings, dukes, warlords, etc, etc. Most of the world for most of history has been run with approaches that are miles off "greatest (economic) good for the greatest number". Conspiracy is entirely unnecessary to explain that, just individuals seeking social dominance by any means that come to hand.
Sign me up.
Now, I'm not arguing that it _should_ or has to be this way. I'm just highlighting the usual arguments made when discussing why the rich may conspire to keep some people poor.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2018/05/03/607996811/worker-shortage-hur...
Parliament and nobility literally got together to a) ban unionisation b) fix wages at an unfairly low level c) punish anyone who refused to work at the wages that were fixed below market d) refused to work for an employer who treated him unfairly.
And that cycle has repeated itself all the way through to the 21st Century (Bay View Massacre, etc)
IF you don't think the wealthy actively work to suppress the working classes indirectly or directly, you are truly naive.
Remember revolutions ae carried out by the middle class.
Like.. these are the richest of the richest companies in the richest country by far whose owners are also amongst the richest people on earth, and they won't hire people to do real reviews or checks of inventory or speak to customers or review advertising campaigns for shady or misleading ads, and tons of other things that people complain about. "It doesn't scale" == "I'll take the hit when someone eventually games the system".
> And Ginsberg answers: Moloch does it.
> There’s a passage in the Principia Discordia where Malaclypse complains to the Goddess about the evils of human society. “Everyone is hurting each other, the planet is rampant with injustices, whole societies plunder groups of their own people, mothers imprison sons, children perish while brothers war.”
> The Goddess answers: “What is the matter with that, if it’s what you want to do?”
> Malaclypse: “But nobody wants it! Everybody hates it!”
> Goddess: “Oh. Well, then stop.”
> The implicit question is – if everyone hates the current system, who perpetuates it? And Ginsberg answers: “Moloch”. It’s powerful not because it’s correct – nobody literally thinks an ancient Carthaginian demon causes everything – but because thinking of the system as an agent throws into relief the degree to which the system isn’t an agent.
From the slatestarcodex classic: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
It could be better if...
Or maybe that is the way we are, those who extract, those who survive, and those who complain about living in a first-world experiencing a little inconvenience in apple app store.
Or maybe free creation of value is unlocked only after enough wealth is extracted by some big group somewhere else and injected into the market.
If these cycles exist, to break them “we” need to open much better possibilities than subj for everyone. But borders are closed, and when one opens them, they hear yet another complaint.
That is quite wasteful and only exists to solve a legal, not technological problem.
Good analysis - it's all just about money (which means existence).
Too bad many people don't want to see that and still believe in "the american dream" and other fairy tales so they can keep up serving for these few parasites until they die.
That's why I totally understand a lot of criminals (doing stuff that doesn't really harm others like shoplifting or selling drugs that aren't killing people) - they just try to survive.
This is so full of awesome I am at a loss for words to describe it.
It doesn't matter how, it matters whether you made it.
There are bad shitty people and bad intentions across all populations. Rich or poor. Men or Women. Old or Young.
I agree that there are bad people everywhere. But practicing many kinds of badness requires power over others. So it's entirely unsurprising that people who like those kinds of badness will disproportionately seek power.
And I'm hardly the first to observe this. As Douglas Adams wrote: "It is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it..."
I was wondering why is obscure, crappy apps in apple store get so many positive reviews.
Apple/AMZN need to up their game in reviews/ratings domains.
If you are selling to people outside your main currency though, you need someway to convert it back and "digital" transactions seem ideal so I can see the extra cost being worth it (you just happen to have a lot of american customers who like your digital product...)
Using a real physical business has a lot of problems that apps do not.
https://complyadvantage.com/blog/blog-money-laundering-via-a...
Just to be clear: I don't condone money laundering and I don't suggest you do it!
Anybody without a technical background could read this and think that MongoDB is some kind of Apple accounts generator software.
This looks very much like standard credit card fraud to me.
Now take this and have an organization doing it. They probably pay people across the world to get the gift cards they use.
The goal here isn’t to obscure the source of the money, the goal is to monetize credit card fraud.
Nobody would actually use iTunes to launder money, the fees are simply too high.
>Then I make clean money on the developer side.
That money is not clean.
>Maybe I’ll use gift cards to buy gift cards to buy gift cards.
And lose all of your money to apples fees and taxes, which is precisely why nobody would ever do this.
Let's say I've bought these bogus cards. This is the starting point, with dirty money. Anything bought here is obvious and traceable. I take that money, and I buy Visa gift cards, which basically function as cash. I take those Visas and buy Amex gift cards, losing 6% (ballparking here, it's actually 5.95% for $100) of my take to fees and then another 10% to fees/shipping for Amex. I funnel those through fake app purchases on the app store and lose a further 20% of my original take.
I now have about 55-65% of my original take in relatively clean money that I convert to bitcoin and back. If you're talking thousands of dollars here, this can easily be worth it. Doubly so if you live in a country where the expectations of police are that they're not going to have the resources to pursue this kind of crime for whatever reason. Get enough people doing this and enough accounts to make the flow through multiple channels, and you've got yourself the makings of a multi-million dollar money laundering service you can sell out to identity thieves (or use for your own thieves).
I'm no tax investigator expert, but I cannot think of a more sketchy/illegal way to "make a lot of money" than by receiving a bunch of bitcoin especially considering every bitcoin transaction is recorded on a public leger. They have every accounts history you received money from. How are you going to explain receiving all those transactions? At least with your app, you have something to show what people paid for even if it is shit.
THAT SAID, there's nothing illegal about using money from your app store company to purchase bitcoin. IDK that it even feels that weird these days with crypto being proto-mainstream at this point. Easily hand waved away as "Oh, he's one of those weird tech guys".
Most criminal activity is risky. The bet you're making is "this is unlikely to be investigated thoroughly enough for me to be caught". Considering how the government keeps gutting the IRS, and how difficult investigating cybercrimes is for most police departments, this isn't even implausible in the US.
Does not make any sense if you’re trying to launder money in a bank account or cash.
It was de-facto the only "Internet business" at the time, and, I admit, my first introduction to making money in the Internet.
All other things that got Russia its later fame like the huge carding scene, industrial scale spam ops, and such evolved out of it.
Ironically, out of all of that, the warez scene died out first, due to its own success. When people were getting their first fibre/dedicated copper Internet connections, people stopped paying even the measly $3 for warez copies on physical CDs.
By the way, WeChat has a really nice way to cope with fake likes. For official accounts they hide the total number of subscribers, leaving only the number of friends that read this account. Instagram is hiding the number of likes on posts in several countries as well, in order to "remove pressure" on users.
I think that is on of the ways for healthier content ecosystem.
If there's a game, there's a gamer.
People are gonna play the game. (In this case, winning the click counts.)
.... and censorship for the government.
The secret weapon is Heap Analytics, which allows define data points collection on the fly without recompile the app and republish with hard-coded predefined event hooks.
Ill sit out being spyed on even more intensively in the name of "telemetry" thanks.
Now that I think about it, VISA and Mastercard are probably in a very good position to be some kind of trusted ad-middleman.
I mean at an even lower level why can't the packets sent to the app store be collected analyzed and then forged.
Just don't understand why.
No you're not curious. You're sarcastic. And a wanker.