After some digging, the Reddit user discovered that his Motorola Razr 60 Ultra was making requests to devicenative.com, a company that serves “personalized, on-device mobile ads,” with the preloaded Smart Feed app handling the redirects.

Based on additional research done by 9to5Google, it appears that a recent Smart Feed update (v2.03.0070) is the culprit. Weirdly enough, they could not reproduce the issue on another Moto phone on which they sideloaded the same app.

What’s more bizarre is that the redirect adds an affiliate code that seemingly belongs to a fashion influencer. It’s unclear why Motorola would inject a third-party affiliate code into Amazon links, especially when the code doesn’t match any of the ones publicly used by the influencer. This raises the possibility that the code is being impersonated or spoofed rather than legitimately associated with them.

It could also be that the Smart Feed app has been compromised, leading to this scammy behavior. Or has the increased component pricing forced Motorola to get creative and earn money through indirect affiliate code injection?

If it’s the former, hopefully, Motorola will quickly take action and resolve the issue, as this certainly does not bode well from a trust and safety viewpoint. Dragging this out for too long will only harm Motorola’s reputation.

Until then, if you own a Moto phone, disable the Smart Feed app even if you are not seeing this scammy behavior.