Although Facebook holds the crown as the most popular social media platform in the world, it is also known as being involved in more privacy scandals than any other social networking platform. Facebook does, no matter how you look at it, have a tarnished image as a direct result of being involved in such scandals.
Recently, just yesterday, on Tuesday, Aug. 6, 2019, Facebook Inc. filed a lawsuit against two Asia-based developed of mobile apps that allegedly infused several apps available for Android devices on the Google Play store with malware that helped them perpetrate a scheme that ultimately resulted in the two app developers receiving a boatload of money in the form of advertising revenue that they didn’t actually deserve.
The two companies allegedly engaged in click injection fraud, which is a complex, advanced type of click spamming. Put simply, the two app developers equipped every version of the seemingly-legitimate mobile apps they pumped out on the Google Play store with click injection malware that helped them increase the number of clicks they got on those apps’ advertisements. Even though digital advertising platforms have developed rigorous automated tools that detect fraud as it is related to advertising revenue inflation to prevent them paying out too much money to interests that don’t actually deserve such funds, these two developers managed to do a good enough job to sneak by such security.
The two app developers are named JediMobi Tech Ltd., which is based out of Singapore, and LionMobi Holding Ltd., which is located in Hong Kong, a semi-autonomous portion of the People’s Republic of China. JediMobi Tech Ltd. is responsible for the creation of Calculator Plus, a relatively popular mobile app that people use to better deal with math problems of all shapes and sizes. Further, LionMobi Holding Ltd. created Power Clean, a utility tool that helps mobile device users get more from their devices by getting rid of files, apps, and programs that don’t have any true utility or simply take up too much space relative to how much utility their users get out of them.
LionMobi Holding Ltd. immediately released a statement after news of Facebook filing the lawsuit in California District Court, sharing that the company had always operated in concordance with the advertising policies that Facebook has outlined.
JediMobi Tech Ltd., on the other hand, still has not put out an official statement regarding the lawsuit.
