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America’s DIY Phone Farmers

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Re: America’s DIY Phone Farmers

#21

Post by Scoundreller »

newguy1234 wrote: post #13
droithomme wrote: post #3

If someone's life is so desperate that doing this is worth the time investment, I can't begrudge them it. Likewise with those poor souls who survive and are thankful to eat rotting refuse from dumpsters. Perhaps the income will help them lift themselves up to the point they can pursue a more satisfying life.

I used to do phone farming. You don't understand how it works. After you setup your farming rig, all you had to do was put about 1 hour per day of maintenance into it, often times even less than that...and you would earn $1,000-$2,000 per month from it in gift cards. All of the apps were passive, it just would loop over and over playing ads.

Curious about what maintenance was required: looking for new programs? Installing new programs? Actual interaction with phones? Culling broken devices?

Re: America’s DIY Phone Farmers

#22

Post by dylz »

Scoundreller wrote: post #21
newguy1234 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to do phone farming. You don't understand how it works. After you setup your farming rig, all you had to do was put about 1 hour per day of maintenance into it, often times even less than that...and you would earn $1,000-$2,000 per month from it in gift cards. All of the apps were passive, it just would loop over and over playing ads.

Curious about what maintenance was required: looking for new programs? Installing new programs? Actual interaction with phones? Culling broken devices?

Restarting crashed apps (ads can load their own awful code), tapping periodic "are you still watching", swapping between apps during certain hours for more revenue

Re: America’s DIY Phone Farmers

#23

Post by newguy1234 »

Scoundreller wrote: post #19
newguy1234 wrote: post #12

I used to do this awhile back and yes it is true. You could make around $1,000-$2,000 per month in gift cards doing it with maybe 50-70 phones. Most apps being used were 100% passive. The only thing you needed to do was restart the phone every 24 hours. The apps would run and show ads to you and just loop over and over. So what about electricity costs? for running 70 phones 24/7 in a month, that was about $10 more in…

We’re you able to re-sell the phones later on? At a loss, break even or even a profit? Or was the ultra-low-end phone market only existent because of buyers for this market?

No. Most of the phones were completely destroyed. The problem is that lithium ion batteries will bloat up after a while. Keep in mind, these phones were pulled in 24/7/365 basically which destroys the battery over time. To me, it was a cost of doing business so to speak. Toss 'em and swap 'em is the saying.

Re: America’s DIY Phone Farmers

#24

Post by newguy1234 »

trhway wrote: post #20
newguy1234 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that these apps were offered as stuff like "play games, earn rewards." "watch videos, earn rewards" etc. so I don't know how it could even be remotely related to shoplifting or cc fraud...where those are so obvious.

>"play games, earn rewards." "watch videos, earn rewards" "pay money, take the bagel". Violating such a contract by intentionally and knowingly skipping or falsifying the delivery of your part of the exchange looks to me like a fraud [IANAL].

The games had "auto advance" modes built directly in to them.

Re: America’s DIY Phone Farmers

#25

Post by newguy1234 »

Scoundreller wrote: post #21
newguy1234 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to do phone farming. You don't understand how it works. After you setup your farming rig, all you had to do was put about 1 hour per day of maintenance into it, often times even less than that...and you would earn $1,000-$2,000 per month from it in gift cards. All of the apps were passive, it just would loop over and over playing ads.

Curious about what maintenance was required: looking for new programs? Installing new programs? Actual interaction with phones? Culling broken devices?

Basically, every day you reset any phones that were frozen. That would take 15 mins or so. Every now and then you would have to swap out a phone that was boot looping. Every now and then update the app. I would say 20-30 hours per month maybe?

Re: America’s DIY Phone Farmers

#26

Post by ryacko »

moron4hire wrote: post #8

I feel like the best strategy to combat this would be to create lightweight virtualization and automation tools that could be easily deployed by anyone, thereby destroying any company that comes up with these stupid strategies. Just burn the whole system down to the ground, salt the earth, and leave it to be a weird blip in internet history. EDIT: I'm a guy who builds thing and occasionally takes a chance at trying t…

Someone would have to pay a kernel developer to modify LineageOS (or a similar project) to be oriented towards multiple concurrent instances of the same app, spoofing device IDs, identifying when an app needs attention, etc.

But people tend towards short sightedness and selfishness, so no one is going to spend a few thousand dollars for a product that would take months to produce.

Re: America’s DIY Phone Farmers

#27

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

ryacko wrote: post #26
moron4hire wrote: post #8

I feel like the best strategy to combat this would be to create lightweight virtualization and automation tools that could be easily deployed by anyone, thereby destroying any company that comes up with these stupid strategies. Just burn the whole system down to the ground, salt the earth, and leave it to be a weird blip in internet history. EDIT: I'm a guy who builds thing and occasionally takes a chance at trying t…

Someone would have to pay a kernel developer to modify LineageOS (or a similar project) to be oriented towards multiple concurrent instances of the same app, spoofing device IDs, identifying when an app needs attention, etc. But people tend towards short sightedness and selfishness, so no one is going to spend a few thousand dollars for a product that would take months to produce.

> multiple concurrent instances of the same app, spoofing device IDs, identifying when an app needs attention, etc.

The first 2 are legitimately useful features in general, and for that matter I believe spoofing the device ID was already possible via xprivacy. But consider: Being able to have multiple instances of the same exact app, with different data storage, and in an ideal world the ability to run multiple of them at the same time, would be cool ... but also useful. As an obvious example, consider that mobile browsers don't support multiple profiles like desktop browsers do; this would make that work.

Re: America’s DIY Phone Farmers

#28

Post by segfaultbuserr »

newguy1234 wrote: post #10
imgabe wrote: post #5

Is there a way to do this without buying actual phones? If you could fool the app into believing an Android VM is a phone you could really scale it up.

No. The reason is because it is easy for the app developers to detect when you are using a VM. The ad networks also have a bunch of detection software running to find it as well. Same goes for using proxy/vpn. You will be banned very quickly for doing it. Do not even attempt it.

I guess It's only a matter of time and resources to develop new code that would pass the VM detection, perhaps not for the majority of phone farmers but should not be a problem for those readers who has a relevant background on HN.

1. Patch VM.

2. Launch 1,000 instances.

3. ???

4. Profit?

Re: America’s DIY Phone Farmers

#29

Post by tazard »

newguy1234 wrote: post #10
imgabe wrote: post #5

Is there a way to do this without buying actual phones? If you could fool the app into believing an Android VM is a phone you could really scale it up.

No. The reason is because it is easy for the app developers to detect when you are using a VM. The ad networks also have a bunch of detection software running to find it as well. Same goes for using proxy/vpn. You will be banned very quickly for doing it. Do not even attempt it.

From the article: > One farmer said they do sometimes virtualize phones on their PC, but due to how resource intensive that can be on the computer, it works out as more cost effective to have a selection of cheap phones instead.

So I guess the answer would be yes, but it doesn't make a lot of sense/cents

Re: America’s DIY Phone Farmers

#30

Post by nothrabannosir »

newguy1234 wrote: post #12

I used to do this awhile back and yes it is true. You could make around $1,000-$2,000 per month in gift cards doing it with maybe 50-70 phones. Most apps being used were 100% passive. The only thing you needed to do was restart the phone every 24 hours. The apps would run and show ads to you and just loop over and over. So what about electricity costs? for running 70 phones 24/7 in a month, that was about $10 more in…

You have my support for bleeding advertisers (and paying taxes ;) ) but I do want to point out one thing which is sometimes overlooked:

> some I think were reported stolen as well

If true, that incentivises phone theft. The only reason people steal phones is because there's a market. Every purchase of a stolen good directly incentivises that thief to steal once more. It's a very direct link. If you've ever had anything stolen, please break the chain and consider verifying somehow, some way, that your next purchase wasn't originally lifted off someone else. It can suck, especially if you've been a victim yourself and it's just unfair.

Other than that thanks for doing your part in poisoning the advertising well :)

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