This clever scam lets advertisers make money by draining your Android phone

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Author: Sean Hollister

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Remember when we learned it was theoretically possible for a webpageor app — to steal your processor cycles to mine cryptocurrency, potentially draining your battery and cellular data in the process? BuzzFeed reports that ad networks have figured out a similar scam — one that lets lucrative, power-hungry video advertisements hide behind traditional banner ads in Android apps, so users don’t even know they’re there.

According to BuzzFeed, it’s not app developers to blame — they were surprised to find an influx of complaints about why their apps are draining users’ batteries and eating up more than their fair share of data. Instead, the report suggests that the ad networks they’d signed up with had been hijacked by fraudsters within the...

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