Specialized motherboard manufacturers in China equip motherboards with up to 20 smartphone motherboard components, insert them into rack systems and sell the system together with control software. These kits are the basis for smartphone farms. This emerges from the “315 Gala”, a program broadcast on China Central Television (CCTV) on the occasion of World Consumer Day. It shows companies that violate consumer or market regulation rights.
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This year, the topic was motherboard manufacturers who produce kits for smartphone farms, which in turn can be used for various criminal activities and manipulations online.
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Such smartphone motherboards could also be assembled by the thousands for a network of cell phones. Remote control is also possible. Some systems are also offered as “cloud smartphones”. Because the system can simulate multiple users, it is officially advertised as a “game development and testing tool.”
The customers of these manufacturers are not only individuals, but also companies, which in turn act as smartphone farm service providers. Criminals can use such systems to commit fraud in social networks, online gaming and online voting. Each smartphone can be operated with its own IP address, which can be changed as needed in order to avoid detection by regulatory authorities or online platform providers.
Smartphone farm as a further development of the click farm
Click farms used to be often found in developing countries, such as Thailand, where click fraud was carried out on a large scale using 350,000 SIM cards and 500 iPhones. People sit there in front of rows of smartphones that they have to operate. Depending on the order, the goal of such click farms is to click on advertising links, generate likes, followers or increase access numbers on websites.
The manual click work is stupid, but it is not a human simulation – which is why it is not so easily recognized as fraud using automated filters. More bots and click fraud malware are now being used for ad fraud worldwide. But click farms with people still exist – as a CCN report from a photographer in Vietnam shows.
Waves of SMS scams and phishing messages
Smartphones can be used not only for click fraud, but also for sending fraudulent SMS and phishing messages. Often not individual recipients, but entire groups of recipients are contacted as potential victims of this smishing scam. Providers try to block such waves of fraudulent messages, but criminals are constantly coming up with new variants for SMS fraud.
Senders can not only be Trojans that send messages on infected devices, but also perpetrators who use their own smartphone farms. In a smartphone farm, several smartphones are placed in a rack and connected to a central control unit. The manual labor of many people to operate multiple devices can be done by a single person or automated using a computer. The perpetrator only needs to obtain the appropriate hardware devices and SIM cards and network access for his DIY smartphone farm.
If you don't have your own smartphone farm, you can use a cybercrime-as-a-service provider. In China there are both manufacturers and operators of such systems, which, however, violate the competition law and telecommunications regulations of the People's Republic.
(mack)