I used to do this awhile back and yes it is true. You could make around $1,000-$2,000 per month in gift cards doing it with maybe 50-70 phones. Most apps being used were 100% passive. The only thing you needed to do was restart the phone every 24 hours. The apps would run and show ads to you and just loop over and over. So what about electricity costs? for running 70 phones 24/7 in a month, that was about $10 more in power. Each phone cost around $20 which I bought off ebay. These were phones where the screen was cracked, the IMEID was blacklisted and some I think were reported stolen as well. This was maybe 3-4 years back though. Over the years, the whole thing has come tumbling down. Now you'll make maybe $100/month and it isn't passive anymore, so not worth doing it but back in the day....we were banking it no doubt about it. Also, yes I would pay tax on all of it. The companies would send a 1099.

This was the guy who showed me how to do it. I just basically copied his routine exactly:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLYNgUdZfmc

This is straight out of 'Armageddon: The Musical' by Robert Rankin.

"On this particular morning, Rex sat in his homemade armchair, facing the flickering TV screen. His was the classic seated posture of the Active Viewer. Relaxed yet attentive, right thumb and forefinger about the remote controller, expression alert, eyes wide. But here all similarities ended. Rex Mundi was fast asleep.

His old Uncle Tony had taught him the technique when he was but a leprous lad, and there was no doubt that it did pay big dividends. It had already earned Rex sufficient rehousing credits to get him overground and he actually possessed a surplus of food and medico rations. His generosity with these made him quite popular and respected locally. But the greatest benefit to Rex was that it left him plenty of time to indulge in his own personal studies. These centred upon a book his Uncle Tony had bequeathed to him, a curious volume entitled The Suburban Book of the Dead. Uncle Tony had pressed-the crumbling tome upon Rex with the simple statement, 'Knowledge is power'.

Shortly after this, he had spontaneously combusted while watching his favourite game show. The way he would have wanted to go,’ Aunty Norma put it."

I feel like the best strategy to combat this would be to create lightweight virtualization and automation tools that could be easily deployed by anyone, thereby destroying any company that comes up with these stupid strategies. Just burn the whole system down to the ground, salt the earth, and leave it to be a weird blip in internet history.

EDIT: I'm a guy who builds thing and occasionally takes a chance at trying to promote those things. I've been on the receiving end of a fair amount of ad-fraud. The tech press is full of stories of people who say they just "put a few ads out" and then took off with their products. It's almost a meme. But it's a filthy lie. It's a lie that you can navigate the ad-tech industry without making it your full-time job. It's a lie that the ad-tech industry is a good way to get attention for your projects. It's a lie that the ad-tech industry is interested in doing anything about fraud. I've dealt with Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon, and in each case at least half of the money I've spent has evaporated away to ad fraud. And then, when you bring it up on HN, you get the replies, "lol, that's just the cost of doing business." No. No no no no no.

The Amazon one was particularly bad, because it lead to me getting a ton of fake followers on Twitter, killing my ranking in their timeline view, requiring me to spend about as much as a total working week on block/unblocking people to kick them out of my followers list, just to get back to a good state. For $50 of advertising, I had to spend around $2000 of my time to fix the issue and got nothing real out of it.

Anyone who helps to wreck the advertising economy is doing a valuable public service.

Is there a way to do this without buying actual phones? If you could fool the app into believing an Android VM is a phone you could really scale it up.

If someone's life is so desperate that doing this is worth the time investment, I can't begrudge them it. Likewise with those poor souls who survive and are thankful to eat rotting refuse from dumpsters. Perhaps the income will help them lift themselves up to the point they can pursue a more satisfying life.