From the Performance Marketing Insider archive. Originally published October 2018. Revisited October 2026.

$500 Million Android Advertising Scam Busted?

Someone bought popular Android apps, watched how real people used them, and taught bots to do the same. Nobody agrees what it cost. Nobody was charged.

By Pesach Lattin

This post first ran on Performance Marketing Insider (performinsiders.com), the affiliate and lead generation trade site Pesach Lattin published from 2011 to 2020. The original text was lost when that site went dark. This page sits at the same address the old links point to, keeps the original headline and date, rebuilds the subject from the public record, and says what happened next.

On October 23, 2018, BuzzFeed News published Craig Silverman's investigation into an Android ad fraud scheme with a genuinely new trick. A front company called We Purchase Apps bought popular apps, moved them to shell companies in Israel, Serbia, Germany, Bulgaria and Malta, and then tracked how real users behaved inside them. That data was used to make bots that mimicked people, generating fake ad views that looked human.

The scale

The apps had been installed more than 115 million times, and more than a dozen were aimed at young users. Protected Media analyzed them for BuzzFeed. Pixalate had exposed part of the operation that June. Google confirmed a botnet, removed more than 30 apps from the Play Store and terminated publisher accounts.

The number

The figure in this headline is the one that does not hold up cleanly. Pixalate estimated fraud on a single app could reach $75 million. An anonymous person connected to the scheme claimed close to $750 million. Google said affected spend by Google advertisers was under $10 million. We could not find $500 million in any source, which makes the honest answer a range wide enough to drive a botnet through. That range is the story: the industry could not even agree how much it had been robbed of.

How it aged

A month later, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn unsealed the 3ve and Methbot indictments, about $36 million across two operations, and in 2021 Aleksandr Zhukov was sentenced to 10 years. The Android scheme followed a different path. It was exposed by reporters, not prosecutors, and we found no charges tied to it. Buying real apps and real users to launder fake traffic is now a standard playbook.

This page rebuilds an October 2018 Performance Marketing Insider post whose original text is not available. Facts come from BuzzFeed News's investigation as reported by Mobile Marketing Magazine and Android Authority, and from DOJ releases on 3ve and Methbot. The $500 million figure in the original headline was not found in any source; the page says so.