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Exposed: Chinese smartphone farms that run thousands of barebones mobes to do crime
(www.theregister.com)
this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2024
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This story won't make your life better: As a broke twenty something, there was an app called SwagBucks (I just looked, it still exists). And you'd get paid for leaving the app up displaying ads. I don't know the state of Android emulators back then, so I bought ~12 cheap phones and left them on 24/7. Eventually, SwagBucks added an inactivity timer, so every 2 hours, I'd walk by the board of phones and tap them to keep going.
This all sounds incredibly stupid, but it was enough to pay for a fun Christmas. I think it was ~$500 in profit, after the cost of phones and electricity were accounted for. Payouts were Amazon giftcards.
I mean it is basically profit on the back of cheap smartphone labor and a lot of wasted electricity, but it works. The stupid amazon giftcards are a problem, you could sell them for anonymous paying though.