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" You download a silly app off the app store. Some dumb little game about waxing eyebrows. It holds your attention for the two or so minutes you expected and then you&amp;#039;re off to something else. A few hours later, you&amp;#039;ve somehow blown\u00A0through all the data for the month. What happened? You&amp;#039;ve just been used in an invisible ad scam.\u00A0 A report conducted by Forensiq, a firm that tracks mobile ad fraud, found that hundreds of apps you can find in official app stores engage in this unscrupulous behavior. Once you download them, they&amp;#039;ll whip up an emulated screen you can&amp;#039;t actually see, beam tons and tons of ads to it, and simulate actual human behavior so it looks like someone is seeing them. Clearly this sucks for advertisers\u2014who are paying to get their ads in front of actual human eyes\u2014but it sucks for you too; apps like this can blow up to 2 GB of data in a day and chew up your battery life in the process. Not cool.\u00A0   How can you avoid getting used like this? Don&amp;#039;t download anything that looks super duper sketchy (which is a good rule for life in general) and if you must, check the reviews beforehand to see if anyone is complaining about anything fishy. And if you do download something and your battery life suddenly drops or data usage suddenly spikes, you can drill into your settings to find out why.\u00A0 On Android, just go to Settings and pick either Battery or Data Usage to see your stats per app. On iOS you can find data statistics under Settings\u00A0&amp;amp;gt;\u00A0Cellular and battery stats under Settings\u00A0&amp;amp;gt;\u00A0General\u00A0&amp;amp;gt;\u00A0Usage\u00A0&amp;amp;gt;\u00A0Battery Usage. Any suspicious spikes here will point out the problem app. But as long as you&amp;#039;re not constantly downloading Celebrity Baby and its ilk, you&amp;#039;ll probably be fine.\u00A0 Source: Forensiq via Bloomberg, Gizmodo "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/apps/news/a16582/invisible-ads-app-scam/>