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Comment by rpdillon | Hacker News Reader

I don't find the assertion credible that people are getting scammed out of more money than the entire platform is worth. But given that Google does not make the revenue for Android public, what kind of numbers do you think you're talking about here?

Also, I think it's disingenuous to say that scams are predominantly powered by sideloading. I think the vast majority of the scams that are perpetrated use apps directly from the Play Store.

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They've been claiming since 2023 that sideloading has been a favored attack vector.

"The Global Scam Report also found that scams were most often initiated by sending scam links via various messaging platforms to get users to install malicious apps and very often paired with a phone call posing to be from a valid entity."

https://security.googleblog.com/2023/10/enhanced-google-play... https://security.googleblog.com/2024/02/piloting-new-ways-to... https://blog.google/intl/en-in/products/launching-enhanced-f...

Googles total revenue in 2025 was about $400 billion across their entire company. It's hard to estimate how much money scammers steal in general but if you take an estimate[1] that each of the 300,000 forced laborers generates $300-400/day then you end up at a figure of 40 billion in scams, and considering android has most of the market in the regions the scammers target you can be pretty sure those are android owners being scammed through android devices.

They're also growing rapidly, so those numbers might already be double in 2026

1. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/dec/02/scam-stat...

These numbers aren't credible. Total credit card fraud globally is projected to reach $43 billion in 2026. You're arguing that fraud on Android alone is equivalent to that. Doesn't smell right.

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