I couldn’t find an existing thread and this isn’t about a specific game per se.
I’ve been seeing a lot of ads recently (on other game apps) for apps that purport to pay out free money to PayPal accounts or in Amazon vouchers just for playing the game. According to the ads, there’s no money required to be gambled or otherwise paid in.
As I’d rather not download one of those to find out, I thought I’d ask here instead: what’s the scam? Are they harvesting PayPal data? Do they never actually pay out? What, as they say, is the dealio?
My wife and I used to enjoy playing HQ, a trivia game using an app on smartphones. It was a live show and each game had a $5000 pot. The show was hosted by a comedian of varying degrees of funny. The people who survived all the way to the end split the pot. I managed to get to the end only once and I got a whopping fifty cents.
The idea seems to have been that they would earn money by having advertising (which never really worked out), having guests on to pitch their latest book, movie, or TV show, or by selling extra lives and other in-game goodies.
Apparently the idea did not work well because they stopped production a couple of weeks ago. I never got my fifty cents because the rules were that you had to get to $20 before they would issue a check. I assume that it actually happened, but I never got that far.
Real/legit games like Drum God mentioned aren’t a scam. The ones you’re referring to, more likely are.
The scam being that they’re not going to give you any money and, at worst, you’ll hand over some financial credentials, at best (or less worse), you’ll unintentionally grant them a ton of permissions which will allow them, legally, to rifle through all your data for anything they can find, which they can sell to whoever they want.
Think about it for a second. Does a flashlight app really need access to your location? Does that game you downloaded really need permission to view your contacts?
How many (picture) filter apps do you have that you’ve given permission to access your camera and pictures (granted, they need that to work, but maybe stick with more legit ones).
All those free apps are making money some how. If they’re not charging you, they’re selling your data.
I get the general principle of data-mining people who download your “free” app (and having in-game purchases). I just didn’t think these games made enough to pay out actual cash to players.
A few years ago (ok probably 10) I had a boring job with lots of downtime and I signed up for a ton of survey apps that paid cash.
For about 40 hours of survey taking, I made about $4.
I expect the game scam is similar- vastly inflating the amount of cash actually available to be won.
There’s a wide range of possibilities. The more legitimate ones will do something like show you ads while you’re playing the game. The money they give out would be a cut of the ad revenue. It could also be a game trying to get traction in the market. The prize money might just be seen as a marketing expense to entice people to play. Or the game might have in-game purchases that they’re hoping you buy as you try to win the prize.
Less legitimate ones will do shady things while you play the game. They might be using the processing power of your phone to do stuff like distributed computing for bitcoin. They might be digging into any data they can get on your phone for whatever purpose. They may continue to do these kinds of things even when you’re not playing the game.