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Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

> The ads and notifications redirect users to the Play Store, where victims are asked to install other apps -- a means through which the xHelper gang is making money from pay-per-install commissions.

Software publishers which have been proven to be paying out commission money from "bait and install" app links, for things published in the Play Store, should have their entire app and developer profile removed with extreme prejudice.

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That's a bold demand, considering that majority of free games in Play Store monetize themselves via partner installs. For all we know, developers of involved apps are paying a "legit" advertising company for installs, and malware authors act as ordinary partners of that company (likely using a bunch of throwaway accounts).

I don't feel sorry for them, they can continue to monetize themselves through pay to win lootboxes and pay to win power boosts instead.

I sometimes install the app and leave it a one star and a comment with the cause: I was on a page and was forcibly redirected to a marketing page for an app. But major apps (atleast in India) won't get punished by a few one stars.

Play store should offer a screen to the users to allow them to report aggressive ads.

How do you prove this? What if they start randomizing?

Through screenshots (and photographs, if needed) of the actual malware running on example devices, or in sandbox environments, or both, and what Play store install pages they're sending people to. I'd certainly hope that there's some team of people at Google doing exactly this already.

Also from bulk analysis tools running against known-malware hosting http daemons out on the Internet. Anybody who's used an android phone for a sufficiently long time and visited a few weird places has seen the javascript redirects for scary-looking pages with "CLEAN 581 VIRUSES FROM YOUR PHONE NOW" pages, designed to mimic android or ios system GUI elements. Inevitably accompanied by a link to a play store page.

Suppose they send you to one of 20 hardcoded applications in the playstore, only one of which is theirs and the other 19 are innocent third parties being used as cover. Do you ban all 20?

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