Facebook in a recent statement says it has filed a suit against two app developers. The company filed these suits for click injection fraud. According to the social media company: “The developers made apps available on the Google Play store to infect their users’ phones with malware.”

 

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“The malware created fake user clicks on Facebook ads that appeared on the users’ phones, giving the impression that the users had clicked on the ads,” it added. They traced the two developers to Hong Kong and Singapore. They were identified as LionMobi from Hong Kong and JediMobi, based in Singapore.

 

JediMobi and LionMobi allegedly “generated unearned payouts from Facebook for misrepresenting that a real person had clicked on the ads.” Facebook says these ads were a part of the company’s Audience Network.

 

LionMobi also faced accusations of violating Facebook’s ad policies by advertising malicious apps on the social networking site. However, according to Facebook, this “lawsuit is one of the first of its kind against this practice.”

 

 

Facebook said it detected the fraud as part of its efforts to investigate and stop abuse by app developers. It also intends to eliminate any abuse of the company’s advertising products. The two app developers, LionMobi and JediMobi have now been banned from Facebook’s Audience Network.

 

The accounts belonging to these app developers have also been disabled. Also, Facebook said it had refunded all the affected advertisers in March 2019.

 

Meanwhile, Google, on the other hand, has also taken several of this kind of actions. They took actions against Play Store apps that use click injection schemes back in October 2018. The tech giant removed over 30 apps using ad fraud schemes.

 

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