Chinese media exposes criminal smartphone farms
theregister.com
theregister.com
In the US, "fake comments or likes – some with SEO-boosting links – or placing fake orders on e-commerce sites." would normally be done using botnet'ed desktop PCs, no need for cell phones.
But Chinese criminals need all the cellphones, so I wonder why? Is this because mobile bot detection is easier to bypass than desktop bot detection? Or maybe desktop bots are so common that cellphone is required for lots of actions?
Chinese platforms within China require authentication and ID verification. In addition, all phones need to be linked with a user's ID. Furthermore, a number of platforms in China are locked behind apps and don't offer a PWA. This is a side effect of mobile phones being the primary computing device in China.
That said, this level of KYC is fairly normal outside of North America and Western Europe.
So much traffic has shifted to mobile that desktop traffic is inherently seen as more suspicious, so the spammers just adapted.
Why does the article not have pictures of this?
If they're re-reporting CCTV coverage, I'm sure they could have included a screenshot of the video under fair use or something.
They all appear to show an mmorpg type of game macroing.