Emulator farm

An emulator is software that pretends to be a phone or TV so developers can test apps on a computer. An emulator farm runs hundreds or thousands of these virtual devices on servers, each installing apps, loading ads and firing events as if a person were using a real handset.

For fraudsters, emulators are cheaper and more scalable than physical device farms: they can be spun up, given fresh advertising IDs, and destroyed in seconds. They are commonly used for install fraud, fake in-app ad impressions, and fake CTV activity, and are often routed through residential proxies to hide their data-center origin.

Detection looks for traits of virtual hardware: generic device models, missing sensors such as accelerometers and gyroscopes (or perfectly still readings), emulator-specific system properties, identical CPU and GPU strings across "different" devices, and battery levels that never change. MMPs and ad SDKs check for these and for device spoofing patterns. Emulator traffic is SIVT.

Think of it like this

An emulator farm is like a theatre filled with cardboard audience cut-outs that can clap on cue: from the stage it sounds like a full house.

An example

A game publisher in South Korea finds 9,000 "new players" in a week whose phones all report the same generic model, zero movement on the gyroscope and a battery permanently at 100%.