Code generators are nothing new on the internet. You can take every type of popular(or even unpopular) Gift Card and you will find a fake generator for it, which promises to give you the Gift Cards for free.
So just do for example the search “free google play codes”. You will see guaranteed results like this on the first Google page.
What are free code generators?
Free code generators should – regarding the name – be generators that can give you free codes. However, they are just annoying scams. The goal of such websites is to persuade the user into thinking that they actually can get, for example, a free Google Play code. Most of them will tell you that they have hacked the servers of Google and are now gifting the codes to everyone who wants for free. Sometimes they don’t try to explain anything and just tell you that it is possible- that’s it. The rest of such pages is mostly full of “empty” SEO text. That means they fill the page with text that has a relation to the main keyword(e.g.”free Google Play Code Generator”). The users cannot see any value in it because the text is just unnecessary. The content is confusing, the language is complex(to have more words) and ironically is the grammar often bad.
What happens if you use a “generator”?
If it happens that a user clicks on the “generate” button he will be asked(in most cases) to share the website on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus or on other social networking sites. Why?
That has two main reasons.
- Sharing means that other users could see the link and visit the website and maybe even use it.
- Sharing gives the website links and sharing gives Google the impression that a particular website or page is good. So if a lot of people share a site, Google will reward the site with a higher ranking.
If the user has done that he will see some low-budget generating process. Most of the times it is just a progress bar that goes from left to right.
The next, and final step – the human verification. The website will display 80% of the “code” and it will ask you to do a human verification in form of a “survey”. If the user does a survey- the scam has worked. For every survey that a user does, the scammer gets around 1-2$. You have to know that the surveys are not legit surveys. They are that kind of surveys that only want your personal information and to trick you into paid subscription services.
Free code Generators are now in the Google Play App Store
The fact that fake free code generators appear in the Google results is not nice, but it is understandable if one has knowledge about the complex world of SEO. But that this type of scam now appears in the Google Play Store is something different. The App Store should be regulated, but you will still find this scam. It is a bit different but it is still a scam and violates the Google Play Store policy.
The free Code Generators in the App Store will not send you to an external fake survey. That would be too obvious to spot. They are actually using normal ads from Adsense to get their scam money.
The usual method in the Google Play App Store is to tell the user something like this: “If you click 100.000 times on this cube/code, you will break it and you will get your code”. That is evil. People really try to do this and are wasting a lot of time. But almost all such Apps have a high star rating- how is this possible?
After X amount of clicking the scammers will block your clicks with a pop-up that commands you to give the app a 5-star rating or else you are not allowed to continue.
And after each 100 or so clicks, a random ad will be displayed. They hope you just click on it, because that is what you are doing all the time.
Can I report such apps?
Sure, under every app on the Google App Store is a link to report it. If enough people have reported an app it will be reviewed by a member of the Google Play staff and he will decide if the given app violates the terms and conditions.