Some advertising network distributors have found a way to distribute promotional videos by hiding them behind normal banner ads in Android apps, so users don’t even know they’re there, app developers can’t do anything about it.
This scam looks like the one associated with crypto-money, that is the one that makes the smartphone of the unlucky user a device dedicated to mining digital currency, an operation that intensively uses the computational resources of our small pocket computers and quickly runs it out of battery, making them heat at the same time in a dangerous way; all this happened simply by downloading an application or visiting a deceptive web page.
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Even in the case of hidden video advertising the effects are similar, since the affected applications are basically flooded with videos not requested by their developers and therefore users find themselves complaining about excessive energy expenditure.
The scam isn’t just at the expense of consumers, but also ad networks too, as the scammers buy up cheap banner spots and fill them with expensive video ads, profiting in the process.
This practice is already referred to as “in-banner video ads” and some advertising companies have already revealed that it is worth tens of millions of dollars a month.