There are so many free ad blockers in the market nowadays, but do you know that there are some that is fake too?
Adguard had recently discover another 2 fake ad blocker in google chrome store:
- Both fake AdBlock and uBlock deceive users by using names of legitimate popular ad blockers.
- They have not been taken down by Google despite multiple reports about deceptive naming.
- The real purpose of these extensions is Cookie stuffing — an illegal ad fraud scheme.
- The scale is unprecedented. These two add-ons have more than 1.6 Million “weekly active users”, who were stuffed with cookies of over than 300 websites from Alexa Top 10000. It is difficult to estimate the damage, but I’d say that we are talking about millions of USD monthly.
Actually, there’s a bright side to it. Now that this fraud scheme is uncovered, affiliate programs’ owners can follow the money trail and find out who is behind this scheme. Sentences for cookie stuffing are real so there’s a chance that the developers of these extensions will be held responsible.**
Our advise to you is to use Genuine Ad-blockers both paid and free or the easiest way is to get a VPN account (most VPN account block ads and malicious software nowadays.