Pat PilcherIs it possible to earn decent wads of cash from ‘play to pay’ apps? PAT PILCHER drives himself a little nuts getting to the bottom of this grey area activity.
Times are tough. It’s hard not to notice the growing number of empty stores up for lease in our cities or the large number of homeless people sleeping in empty shop doorways. With layoffs part of our daily news and thousands applying for a single job, money is tight. So, what is a poor Witchdoctor reader to do? Many are turning to side hustles, and even though most offer little to no job security, the small amount of money earned can be the difference between keeping food on the table or finding yourself living in a cardboard box on Struggle Street.
None of this has escaped a growing cadre of shady entrepreneurs targeting people struggling for cash. A particularly popular trick doing the rounds is the play-to-pay scam. Smartphone owners are bombarded with adverts touting games that promise big cash payouts. All you have to do is install and play the game to get cash. Most play-to-pay games are simple and often copies of Tetris, Bejewelled and other simple but addictive casual games.
Curious to see if there was anything to the whole concept, I downloaded a bunch of these titles. What I found was both disappointing and surprising.
I say disappointing because the adverts promoting most play-to-pay games talk up big rewards (often US$500 or more). The flashy adverts are usually fronted by an attractive young woman who waves around handfuls of cash, gushing enthusiastically about how much money she’s made from the game. Add in rapid-fire graphics showing PayPal balances skyrocketing, and it isn’t hard to see how people easily get reeled into the scam.
Based on my own experience and the online comments from many others, the reality is light years away from the bold promises made in the adverts. I typically found that I could play these games and, in one isolated case made a few dollars, which was a far cry from the thousands touted in the blatantly misleading advertising. The simple reality is that almost all of the titles I tried paid nothing, despite slick adverts promising huge payouts (huge payments that go to the scammers via Google ad revenue).
In-game scams take several forms. Most use an in-game currency, typically worth a fraction of a real cent, meaning you must play the game for weeks on end almost non-stop before you can earn even a tiny sum. During that time you’re made to watch an improbable number of adverts, which earns the scammers their cash. To make matters worse, you typically have to earn a large pile of in-game funds before you can cash out. Even then, earning sees you jumping through an endless series of progressively difficult hoops as you earn more in-game currency. Some titles also offer a US$150 joining payment for installing their games. Aside from the fact that the bonus never materialised, sideloading any of these sketchy apps from a video advert presents a potential security risk (more on this later).
I stuck with it (purely in the interests of research for you, our dear reader), and sometimes, I even managed to achieve brain-numbing goals such as watching several hundred adverts in a day or earning an impossibly large amount of in-game money after playing the game all day. One game said I was due to be paid US$500. I claimed the amount and was told to expect a PayPal payment after 7 days. I’m still waiting.
Incredibly, there was one exception where I was actually paid. It was a game called Just Pay (Android/iOS). Yes, it did pay – although I found myself putting in a ridiculous amount of gaming time to earn a mere $2.80. I could have flipped burgers at McDonald’s for the same amount of time and made far more money.
In short, play-to-pay titles are either scams or a complete waste of time, not to mention a potential security risk. Virtually all the games I tried never delivered on the promised payouts. These non-existent and huge promised payouts are, at best, a scam targeting desperate people for money. What irks me the most, however, is the not-so-inconsiderable fact that most of these titles were downloaded from the Google Play store.
It is beyond bizarre that a reputable company like Google, which is relied upon by billions of people worldwide, appears to be enabling these scams via its advertising networks and app store.
Out of curiosity, I trawled through online forums. I found large numbers of angry people who’d never received any of the promised payments. Comfortable that it wasn’t just something I was doing wrong, I reported several of the worst offenders via the Google Play store. All of these reported games are still available for download at the time of writing. Although I contacted Caroline Rainsford, Country Director of Google New Zealand about this thorny issue, she never replied.
Adding insult to injury, the process for reporting these games is convoluted, counterintuitive and inflexible. Most people are typically not prepared to put in the time or effort required to do so, which is probably something fraudsters are banking on as they merrily continue their scam.
Some of the tactics used by the scammers are surprisingly complex. One popular tactic used by scammers is fake celebrity endorsements. I was surprised to see video ads featuring both Elon Musk and YouTube star Mr Beast. In both cases, they were promoting what were clearly scammy game titles. It turns out that Musk and Beast were, in fact, AI-generated deep fakes. These were done so well that there was little to no indication to give Joe and Joanne public any hint that these endorsements were fake.
What also surprised me was the sizeable number of developers working on this scam. They make enough money by forcing users to watch adverts and collecting a wad of Google Ads revenue to make the scam worthwhile. Given Google’s extraordinarily tough policies on vetting Android apps, it is more than a little surprising that these scam apps are even available via Google Play.
Perhaps Google could toughen up its app approvals process and invest in making it easier for scam apps to be reported. They also need to have game ratings and reviews prominently displayed on both the desktop and mobile versions of their store. Last but not least, users should have the ability to report scam Google ads.
So, what should you look for to avoid play-to-pay apps? It is probably a scam if the app promises something that sounds too good to be true. If you have any doubts, spend a small amount of time doing online research before installing and seeing what the prevailing consensus is across multiple online forums and scam-checking sites such as Trusted Advisors. Whatever you do, don’t download and install any of these apps from anywhere but the Google Play store. Google’s internal vetting process means the odds of any of these apps containing malware are far lower than sideloaded apps from unknown sources. If an app offers a bonus incentive if you install it from the link in their advert, don’t do it. Lastly, just in case, install some good security software on your smartphone.
