13 ms·

Click farms: a shadowy internet industry is booming in China

146 points by smaili 7y ago

baybal2 7y ago
Clickfarming used to be a big business in Russia around early 200x. 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.
nickthemagicman 7y ago
I've always wondered a software simulator wouldn't work? Like a bunch of phone VMs behind a proxy.
- anonymous5133 7y ago
  Let's just say you're not the first one to think of that "bright" idea. People running on VM and behind a proxy are easy to detect so you don't get paid for it.
  - nickthemagicman 7y ago
    Right. Not saying I am. Just looking for why. 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.
- Swizec 7y ago
  Very hard to detect a fake click when it’s actually done by a person manually.
Trias11 7y ago
That's how they perpetuate "Made in China"===(Fake|Crap) 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.
- bgbjfcvnkytgd 7y ago
  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.
- mrep 7y ago
  App stores are also used for money laundering. Create a bogus app, spend a bunch of money "buying" your app and now you have "legitimate" money.
  - Trias11 7y ago
    I guess it will work well to launder $50.00
    - troymc 7y ago
      I wasn't familiar with schemes that use app stores for money laundering so I did some basic web searches and it seems it can been used to launder more than $50.00. Here is one example: https://complyadvantage.com/blog/blog-money-laundering-via-app-purchases/ 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!
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - bjhkx 7y ago
        >Then set up a MongoDB database to automatically generate Apple store accounts to create game accounts, Anybody without a technical background could read this and think that MongoDB is some kind of Apple accounts generator software.
princeb 7y ago
i wonder if there will be a possibility in the future where the OS runs app telemetry, looks at things like how long a user spends on an app, parts of the app that the user clicks on, looks at, the text and non-text elements of the app, and then applies a statistical model to determine quality and hence rating of the app. that could obviate the need for "human rating" which is inherently gamable.
- throwaway2048 7y ago
  Not sure why you think that isn't game-able as well, they already use massive racks of real phones. Ill sit out being spyed on even more intensively in the name of "telemetry" thanks.
- broth 7y ago
  I feel like this approach would eventually become gamed since you could still have human participants act as engaged users.
- est 7y ago
  We run hundreds of pipelines like this to fight against click-farms and spam bots.... .... 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.
- nitwit005 7y ago
  It might up the costs, but you can always record the behavior of real humans and replay it with randomization elements. You'd can fairly easily fake a bunch of engaged people.
wpietri 7y ago
There was a reply here, now dead, that I wanted to discuss: "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.
- marak830 7y ago
  Just before my son was born, I was struggling to find a stable job. 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.
mrtweetyhack 7y ago
Money in googles pocket.
bctnry 7y ago
It's not "booming", not in the sense of "it just got big all of a sudden"; it is big, and it has been there (and big) for a very, very long time.
playbigwin 7y ago
A tangent: What if Bill Clinton never sold out to the Chinese military, and did not grant China Most favored nation trade status in 1994? Or what if Bill Clinton was never elected president? Then China would have never received the billions in investments from US. And US companies and factories would have never moved there. Instead maybe a democratic country like India or Mexico would have been the recipient of the offshoring efforts. Then we wouldn't have IP theft from China, fentanyl destroying families, a threat to democracies like Russia but much much bigger, better products than the shoddily made ones from China, etc What would history look like if we didn't prop up the Chinese communist party?
- pjc50 7y ago
  The alternative might have been trying to "contain" China like Iran. Not cooperating with China does not make China go away.
  - toxik 7y ago
    Little trading with China would have slowed their development down enough that it would have been more difficult to control the population. The Tiananmen protests and subsequent government-approved slaughter in 1989 would have been a lot harder to ignore if things weren’t going so well.
  - skunkpocalypse 7y ago
    Not enabling Russian IP theft didn't make Russia go away either. What it did was make them lose the Cold War, since they couldn't cheat anymore: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Vetrov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Vetrov
    - pjc50 7y ago
      Sure, and then what? The US still has bad relations with Russia, a dictatorial petrostate which has shot down a civilian airliner and sent its agents to murder people on British soil. That's what I mean by "doesn't make China go away". Collapsing the CCP raises the question of what next. Going through a period of shortened life expectancy and government by organised crime but with a nuclear arsenal?
skunkpocalypse 7y ago
> I'm curious No you're not curious. You're sarcastic. And a wanker.
- dang 7y ago
  We've banned this account for breaking the site guidelines and posting unsubstantive comments. Please don't create accounts to do that with on HN. It eventually gets your main account banned as well. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
danielscrubs 7y ago
You get what you measure. Now that I think about it, VISA and Mastercard are probably in a very good position to be some kind of trusted ad-middleman.
RickJWagner 7y ago
If there's a way to score, it's a game. If there's a game, there's a gamer. People are gonna play the game. (In this case, winning the click counts.)
nrki 7y ago
Auto-playing videos need to die.
zkid18 7y ago
I think the roots of fake engagement are coming from our perception of key success metrics for content creators. I don't blame those people - advertisers and services are more in charge of that behavior. We tend to think that likes and views are the key signs of content quality or popularity. 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.

146 points by smaili 7y ago

Clickfarming used to be a big business in Russia around early 200x. 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.

nickthemagicman 7y ago

I've always wondered a software simulator wouldn't work? Like a bunch of phone VMs behind a proxy.

anonymous5133 7y ago
Let's just say you're not the first one to think of that "bright" idea. People running on VM and behind a proxy are easy to detect so you don't get paid for it.
- nickthemagicman 7y ago
  Right. Not saying I am. Just looking for why. 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.
Swizec 7y ago
Very hard to detect a fake click when it’s actually done by a person manually.

Trias11 7y ago

That's how they perpetuate "Made in China"===(Fake|Crap) 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.

bgbjfcvnkytgd 7y ago
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.
mrep 7y ago
App stores are also used for money laundering. Create a bogus app, spend a bunch of money "buying" your app and now you have "legitimate" money.
- Trias11 7y ago
  I guess it will work well to launder $50.00
  - troymc 7y ago
    I wasn't familiar with schemes that use app stores for money laundering so I did some basic web searches and it seems it can been used to launder more than $50.00. Here is one example: https://complyadvantage.com/blog/blog-money-laundering-via-app-purchases/ 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!
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - bjhkx 7y ago
      >Then set up a MongoDB database to automatically generate Apple store accounts to create game accounts, Anybody without a technical background could read this and think that MongoDB is some kind of Apple accounts generator software.

princeb 7y ago

i wonder if there will be a possibility in the future where the OS runs app telemetry, looks at things like how long a user spends on an app, parts of the app that the user clicks on, looks at, the text and non-text elements of the app, and then applies a statistical model to determine quality and hence rating of the app. that could obviate the need for "human rating" which is inherently gamable.

throwaway2048 7y ago
Not sure why you think that isn't game-able as well, they already use massive racks of real phones. Ill sit out being spyed on even more intensively in the name of "telemetry" thanks.
broth 7y ago
I feel like this approach would eventually become gamed since you could still have human participants act as engaged users.
est 7y ago
We run hundreds of pipelines like this to fight against click-farms and spam bots.... .... 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.
nitwit005 7y ago
It might up the costs, but you can always record the behavior of real humans and replay it with randomization elements. You'd can fairly easily fake a bunch of engaged people.

wpietri 7y ago

There was a reply here, now dead, that I wanted to discuss: "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.

marak830 7y ago
Just before my son was born, I was struggling to find a stable job. 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.

mrtweetyhack 7y ago

Money in googles pocket.

bctnry 7y ago

It's not "booming", not in the sense of "it just got big all of a sudden"; it is big, and it has been there (and big) for a very, very long time.

playbigwin 7y ago

A tangent: What if Bill Clinton never sold out to the Chinese military, and did not grant China Most favored nation trade status in 1994? Or what if Bill Clinton was never elected president? Then China would have never received the billions in investments from US. And US companies and factories would have never moved there. Instead maybe a democratic country like India or Mexico would have been the recipient of the offshoring efforts. Then we wouldn't have IP theft from China, fentanyl destroying families, a threat to democracies like Russia but much much bigger, better products than the shoddily made ones from China, etc What would history look like if we didn't prop up the Chinese communist party?

pjc50 7y ago
The alternative might have been trying to "contain" China like Iran. Not cooperating with China does not make China go away.
- toxik 7y ago
  Little trading with China would have slowed their development down enough that it would have been more difficult to control the population. The Tiananmen protests and subsequent government-approved slaughter in 1989 would have been a lot harder to ignore if things weren’t going so well.
- skunkpocalypse 7y ago
  Not enabling Russian IP theft didn't make Russia go away either. What it did was make them lose the Cold War, since they couldn't cheat anymore: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Vetrov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Vetrov
  - pjc50 7y ago
    Sure, and then what? The US still has bad relations with Russia, a dictatorial petrostate which has shot down a civilian airliner and sent its agents to murder people on British soil. That's what I mean by "doesn't make China go away". Collapsing the CCP raises the question of what next. Going through a period of shortened life expectancy and government by organised crime but with a nuclear arsenal?

skunkpocalypse 7y ago

> I'm curious No you're not curious. You're sarcastic. And a wanker.

dang 7y ago
We've banned this account for breaking the site guidelines and posting unsubstantive comments. Please don't create accounts to do that with on HN. It eventually gets your main account banned as well. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

danielscrubs 7y ago

You get what you measure. Now that I think about it, VISA and Mastercard are probably in a very good position to be some kind of trusted ad-middleman.

RickJWagner 7y ago

If there's a way to score, it's a game. If there's a game, there's a gamer. People are gonna play the game. (In this case, winning the click counts.)

nrki 7y ago

Auto-playing videos need to die.

zkid18 7y ago

I think the roots of fake engagement are coming from our perception of key success metrics for content creators. I don't blame those people - advertisers and services are more in charge of that behavior. We tend to think that likes and views are the key signs of content quality or popularity. 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.