Last year, Jeremiah’s TikTok started feeding him ads for a new way to make money. The clips — some clearly made with AI, others featuring influencers — promised a payday for playing mobile games or, in some cases, simply for watching TikTok. You can “get paid to scroll,” they told an audience of people who were already scrolling. Some of the ads acknowledged this might sound too good to be true but insisted, of course, that it wasn’t.

Jeremiah tried out a few of these apps. They had names like KashKick, Swagbucks, and Mistplay. After wasting hours on games in KashKick for low payouts with too many restrictions and caveats, he switched to an app called Freecash. Most of the featured games are traps, he said — the rewards decrease as you play and give you unreachable targets — but he eventually put together a routine. At 44, he had spent years playing World of Warcraft and ’90s strategy games before it. “I can grind,” he said, “and that’s what most of these games are.” Now, he was grinding for cash by playing iPhone-era strategy games like Rise of Kingdoms, which involves building cities and battling other players for virtual resources and land. By assembling his army and succeeding in the game, he could eventually reach goals in Freecash, then redeem them for a few real dollars. Beyond his gaming background, Jeremiah had the time — he worked in farming for years in eastern North Carolina but had since gone on disability — so he professionalized his operation. He played multiple games at once: Age of Dragons, Legend of Mushroom, and countless similar ones that would pop up in Freecash’s list of offers with better terms. He set up multiple profiles on a folding Samsung phone where he could check on his progress and track his earning tasks at the same time.

Jeremiah’s fate within the games, which were themselves about the slow and precarious accumulation of virtual resources, soon had real stakes. He started setting timers so he wouldn’t miss chances to upgrade or progress. He also had to be constantly vigilant against raids, in which other players, some grinding for credit in apps like Freecash themselves, could attack and steal in-game resources, indirectly robbing Jeremiah of real earnings in the process. He defends himself by working with a clan of allied players gathered from the strange and ephemeral social environments that briefly materialize at different levels of the get-paid-to, or GPT, app ecosystem. “90 percent of the time, you get up on a server that’s full of Brazilians, but there are also a lot of people from Malaysia and the Philippines,” he said. With the arrival of automatic AI translation, these in-game chats have become somewhat more useful and less alienating. “We’ll discuss the strategy for getting higher on the game,” he added. Some are in it for the money. Others are just addicted.

For mobile-game companies, apps like Freecash are a way to buy downloads but also to filter their customers, paying out small amounts to find out which might end up spending even more. (The industry borrows a term, whales, from casinos for the big spenders who make the business model work.) Earning money by playing these games is hard. Spending it is easy. Using real money to buy in-game resources in Rise of Kingdom, for example, can speed up progress and increase your power in the game, allowing........

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