Oracle Claims a Fighter of Pirated Apps is a Front For Ad Fraud

A company that claims to combat app piracy is a pirate itself, according to a report Oracle released this week. From a report: Oracle claims the company, Tapcore, has been perpetrating a massive ad fraud on Android devices by infecting apps with software that ring up fake ad impressions and drain people's data. Based in The Netherlands, Tapcore works with developers to identify when apps are pirated and then enables developers to make money from those bootleg copies by serving ads. Oracle says that Tapcore's anti-piracy code was a Trojan horse that was generating fake mobile websites to trick ad serving platforms into paying them for non-existent ad inventory.

'The code is delivering a steady stream of invisible video ads and spoofing domains,' Dan Fichter, VP of software development at Oracle Data Cloud, tells Ad Age. 'On all those impressions it looked like the advertiser was running ads on legitimate mobile websites. Not only were they not on a website, they were on an invisible web browser.' On its website, Tapcore says it works with more than 3,000 apps, serving 150 million ad impressions a day. The apps whose pirated versions it has worked with include titles like 'Perfect 365,' 'Draw Clash of Clans,' 'Vertex' and 'Solitaire: Season 4,' according to Oracle's report.

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