13 Android Apps in Google Play Store Published Hundreds of Fake Positive Reviews to Drive Downloads

If you were to use mainstream apps that are available on Google Play then chances are that you would have a seamless experience once all has been said and is now out of the way, and you most likely would not have to deal with anything that seems overly suspicious in any major way, shape or form. With all of that having been said and out of the way, it is important to note that the legitimacy of a rather large number of Google Play apps have been brought into question repeatedly, and a recent scandal involving fake reviews has raised even more concerns about whether or not Google is doing enough to prevent fake apps from getting onto the platform.

According to BitDefender, about 13 apps have been found to use fake reviews to drive up their average rating so that people would end up downloading the apps thinking that they are going to give them an improved user experience. However, when users download these apps they often end up getting bombarded with ads, something that many developers do in order to drive up their profit margins. Because of the fact that most users are probably going to end up giving these apps a poor rating, these developers use bots to create fake reviews.

While some of these apps have just a few reviews, one actually has hundreds of them. This app developer has also responded to certain one star or two start reviews asking users to contact them to get problems resolved, but since these users are not changing their ratings it seems unlikely that the developer in question is actually taking these sorts of things seriously otherwise the average user generally improves the rating they gave if the issue they were facing was resolved.

What’s more is that the positive reviews on these apps which are undoubtedly fake are getting called helpful by a lot of other accounts, so it’s quite likely that about a thousand or so fake accounts have been created and these accounts are giving each other’s reviews a helpful rating to further make themselves as legitimate as possible.

This is one of the worst adware campaigns that have come about in recent months, and Google really needs to get its affairs in order otherwise most users are going to stop trusting the Google Play Store without a shadow of a doubt.

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