Lures for Money: A First Look into YouTube Videos Promoting Money-Making Apps

YouTube hosts a wide variety of user-generated videos accessible to a global population of users. The potential of videos to persuade users by engaging them with the experience of the content creator makes them an attractive medium for promoting various kinds of products and services, including apps and websites. The YouTubers promoting these products online may not necessarily be aware of the harm to which they might expose potential users. In fact, they may neither have the incentive nor the technical expertise to look into potential harms.

In this work, we uncover one such ecosystem, where the Youtubers are primarily driven by earning money from their channels, but in doing so expose their audience to fraudulent apps. We collect and analyze a dataset of YouTube videos promoting money-making apps. Such videos convince users (primarily in developing regions) that they can make money by downloading and installing the mobile apps being promoted, and performing simple tasks such as watching videos, installing other apps, or playing games. We study the popularity of these videos and apps, as well as illuminate the types of tasks they promote, and whether these apps are potentially malicious.