My extensions were open source and had no clear path to monetization, so I can only speculate on how the purchasers planned to recoup their investments. The permissions in these extensions would allow them to inject ads or even collect credentials, etc.
Not saying that the top extension developer does this, but people are definitely making money by collecting innocuous Chrome extensions!
It was interesting to see this strategy, they are trying to implicate people to create publisher accounts for them, verified with credit cards that cannot be traced back to them and do not look suspicious. Though the money they have offered seemed too much for the job, I guess they are also trying to hook developers and convince them to do other stuff down the road.
I do get plenty of purchase and monetization offers, some of which I have shared in a blog post [1], but this was a trick I have never encountered before.
[1] https://armin.dev/blog/2019/08/supporting-browser-extension-...
Is your reputation that good? Why not pay any random person $500 for the use of their identity for the same thing.
The add-on module is available in a limited free and paid fully featured version. It is the classical freemium model, which works well for both, the extension creators and the users.
Original comment: That "developer" is Chrome HD Themes and the extensions are themes.
Chrome HD Themes has over 6k published extensions!
Yeah, I kind of like the ability to install extensions for use cases the developer doesn't and can't think of themselves.
- The most popular category is “Productivity” accounting for ~40k extensions and 676M installs
- Google itself authors 155 extensions accounting for ~133M installs
There are in fact 10 default extensions. Will filter them out...
But, you get the benefit of "SSL encryption".
The other features (don't save your search) just seem to make it a bad version of DuckDuckGo.
New Tab-hijacking extensions are incredibly pervasive in the Chrome Web Store, and often installed via malicious websites which use arrows and audio cues to demand a user click the "Install" button Chrome pops up in order to resume web browsing.
MapsGalaxy is another particularly pervasive malware offering: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mapsgalaxy/ijjnmdp... (Just adding this one here in case someone from Google sees this comment and can nuke both from orbit.)
[0] https://blog.malwarebytes.com/detections/rogue-searchencrypt... and any search result should give you some idea: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=search+encrypt&t=ffab&ia=web
If you are interested, it might be helpful to you. It's contributing to the winning "Productivity" category. It lets you see the competitors of almost any software product. Contextually. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/alternative-to-by-...
