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Comment by selectively | Hacker News Reader

Google doesn't want millions of people to have every cent of their money stolen.

This measure is about making it harder to pull off a specific type of scam that is plaguing South East Asia. No conspiracy.

For actual information on the purpose of this change rather than conspiracies, I refer you to https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2026/03/android-de...

Since the victims of these scams do not typically own a traditional computer/cannot be pressured to get to one quickly, ADB will remain a thing.

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With that reasoning every action would be justified to stop scammers. Google should capture all your calls and check if there could be scamming going on, right?

The current malware situation at android store situation does not help to carry that point:

> https://www.forbes.com/sites/daveywinder/2025/03/18/60-milli...

> https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/26/apps_android_malware/

> https://www.androidheadlines.com/2026/04/novoice-android-mal...

> Google should capture all your calls and check if there could be scamming going on, right?

If you're dumb enough to own a Pixel then arguably they're doing something just as bad.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/GooglePixel/comments/1097qm0/manual...

> Google doesn't want millions of people to have every cent of their money stolen.

Megacorporations like Google do not care a single bit about ordinary people. They only care about making more money. How do they make more money? By preventing people from installing NewPipe and Blokada.

I sorta get that reasoning, but is a 24 hour cooldown really going to stop scammers? They're already used to multi-day scams, so wouldn't they just say they'll call back in a day to finish the process?

Yup. The specific scam here is built upon preventing the victim from talking to trusted individuals. A cooldown breaks the spell.

Complex, multi-day pig butchering stuff is not what Google is going after here or would have any hope to defeat. But they can deal with banking malware.

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