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How to scam and get 67k all 5 Star reviews on the app store

159 points by knes 9y ago

uptown 9y ago
See also here: https://www.amazon.com/Bluetooth-Headphones-Earpieces-Earphones-Microphone/dp/B078C61G5M/ https://www.amazon.com/Bluetooth-Headphones-Earpieces-Earpho... 136 reviews, all of the same general format, all 5 star reviews, nothing critical in any of them.
- pcurve 9y ago
  https://www.fakespot.com/product/bluetooth-earbuds-tenfly-wireless-headphones-headsets-stereo-in-ear-earpieces-earphones-with-noise-canceling-microphone-for-iphone-x-8-8plus-7-7plus-6s-samsung-galaxy-s7-s8-ios-android-smart-phones https://www.fakespot.com/product/bluetooth-earbuds-tenfly-wi...
  - aphextron 9y ago
    Bookmarked, thanks
- thisisit 9y ago
  What I find interesting is that Amazon has been adding word cloud for the reviews. It helps in filtering and narrowing down the features. But it is missing on this page. Anyone know if there is any particular reason for that?
bob_theslob646 9y ago
An interesting comment from an employee from the company that gives the revenue estimate in the title. Apparently the number is somewhat accurate according to him.(https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/7mzib4/how_to_scam_200000_per_month_and_get_67882_all_5/dry5eir/ https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/7mzib4/how_to_scam_2...) > We round the numbers for our free users -- the estimate in this case is closer to $150,000 than 200,000 in Nov. Indeed, if Sensor Tower was estimating revenue based on ratings, the seemingly fake reviews and bot users would influence it. > However, the estimates are based on things like Category Rankings in the top charts, and other signal data. You can't get on top of the revenue charts with fake bot reviews -- real users have to spend real money. We work a lot on our models and data science to improve estimates accuracy, and a lot of developers and publishers share their data with us, so we feel pretty confident about the revenue estimates. So while we might be off by a few %, we feel very confident about the data! In comparison, top dating apps like Tinder make >20 million a month on iOS alone. > As you can see, the app has stayed on top of the grossing charts with a lot of consistency, and hasn't been removed from the app store. I know Apple works hard to remove apps that break their terms of service, but they might have not caught it (or are investigating) over the holidays. I know that Apple takes reports like this from the community seriously, and though it might look like they act slowly, they are likely investigate apps like this in detail.
jokoon 9y ago
Aren't there laws to protect consumers against that kind of scam? At that point, what would Apple respond? It seems it's not in Apple's interest to refund customers, and I wonder if they would sue the app maker and investigate fraudulent ratings. Funnily, that would also bring attention to fraudulent comments on net neutrality, and how nothing has been proven yet.
- rightbyte 9y ago
  Apple's getting a revenue share of any sold item in the store ... so. I guess the rational thing for them would be to prevent scams to make ppl less reluctant to shop there, but since there is no obvious short time benefit they hardly care. Compare this to all these "child bought 1000$ worth of Candy Crush items on father's card" etc.
- CharlesW 9y ago
  > I wonder if they would sue the app maker and investigate fraudulent ratings. Apple does investigate this and does take action, yes.[1] > "Almost 1,000 fraudulent reviews were detected across two accounts and 25 apps for this developer so we removed their apps and accounts from the App Store," an Apple spokesperson told iMore. "Warning was given in advance of the termination and attempts were made to resolve the issue with the developer but they were unsuccessful. We will terminate developer accounts for ratings and review fraud, including actions designed to hurt other developers. This is a responsibility that we take very seriously, on behalf of all of our customers and developers." [1] https://www.imore.com/whats-happening-dash-and-app-store https://www.imore.com/whats-happening-dash-and-app-store
orliesaurus 9y ago
Sounds like a sophisticated money laundering scheme - dump money in click farms and fake app purchasing, in exchange for climbing the charts and getting innocent/naive people to purchase at a faster rate. As you climb the charts your app gets more visibility and thus more eye from the innocent/naive purchasing population
- progre 9y ago
  Not likely. If I was laundering money I would rather have a low profile and spread the money over several apps while making sure that none of them end up on the top 30 list. Seems like a pretty straight forward scam: Get suckers to buy the app and an in-app subscription service with fake reviews.
makecheck 9y ago
It’s insulting to real developers of decent apps and games when obvious trash can make it onto the store so easily, remain there, and make money hand over fist, when other apps have to put up with scrutiny and back-and-forth rejections over trivial non-issues even in 2017. Right now, their “improved” App Store doesn’t even have what I would call a search engine. I can search for apps BY NAME and they still show up like #30 on the list below a whole pile of stuff that (I assume) only matches due to some weird random match of letters that happen to be in my search term. There is NO way to narrow the search category, NO filters (not even something so basic as “search only apps released in the last month”), etc. And every single iOS store issue is 1000x worse on the Mac store. They need to take that 30% cut and invest properly. And search problems wouldn’t be so bad if their top-X lists made any sense. Top grossing, really? Great way to see the same 10 apps for like 3 weeks in a row. “Limited Time Prices”? At this very moment on the Mac store, ALL TWELVE “Limited Time Prices” apps are LEGO games! What good is that?
- ElCapitanMarkla 9y ago
  “improved” App Store... it really is terrible. I used to quite often click through different categories looking at the top games / apps etc. Now I hardly bother going into it because its such a cluster fuck to navigate. * I will note though that I do like the editorial type landing page they added to the store during the big "improvement"
- jcadam 9y ago
  After experiencing what iOS 11 has done to my iPhone SE, I'm pretty sure the "Software Engineers" Apple employs these days can't tell the difference between obvious trash and legitimate attempts at useful, working software.
- stingraycharles 9y ago
  I'm not an app dev but a mere user, but I completely understand your frustrations. As a user, the discoverability of new apps is abysmal. I don't understand why Apple can't look at what Amazon etc are doing with their stores, and recommend me apps based on apps I'm using recently ? Whatever happened to Genius suggestions ? And why can't I filter for e.g. strategy games without IAP in the 5-10$ range ? It's terrible and i can only imagine how much this hurts devs. Apple really doesn't care about the long tail.
wellboy 9y ago
I know a guy who submitted apps with a comment, you get $300 if you can help me with some things. 9 out of 10 times it didn't work. But with 1 guy it worked and he promoted fake apps like this.
534b44a 9y ago
Having a dumb search functionality results in tons of blogs and forums discussing software that relates to their niches. The Netflix homepage for guests doesn't provide much information either. Anytime I search for the newest titles on google, I get the most updated top 10's. Good for SEO and keeps the people talking about stuff related to the platform.
drefanzor 9y ago
I'd still like to know 'how' they got all those reviews. Is there a warehouse full of people somewhere in China generating this, so-called 5-star review farmers?
- CharlesW 9y ago
  China and elsewhere, yes. You can Google "buy app store reviews" if you're curious.
- muzani 9y ago
  Fiverr sells them openly and a lot of the people at the top of Fiverr list used to purchase fake reviews for their Fiverr profile too. It's probably easier and more profitable than doing Mechanical Turk jobs.
- Too 9y ago
  https://mk0equediaiphjdq03ev.kinstacdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/clickfarm.jpg https://mk0equediaiphjdq03ev.kinstacdn.com/wp-content/upload...
austinl 9y ago
Here's another great article about a fake security app that was making ~$80,000/month. After selecting "Free trial", the app signed you up for a $99/month subscription. For a while, it was ranked #33 in Top Grossing for Business apps. Apple has since removed it, but there's plenty of apps like this still out there. As someone who has had apps rejected for fairly trivial reasons, stuff like this always frustrating. https://medium.com/@johnnylin/how-to-make-80-000-per-month-on-the-apple-app-store-bdb943862e88 https://medium.com/@johnnylin/how-to-make-80-000-per-month-o...

159 points by knes 9y ago

See also here: https://www.amazon.com/Bluetooth-Headphones-Earpieces-Earphones-Microphone/dp/B078C61G5M/ https://www.amazon.com/Bluetooth-Headphones-Earpieces-Earpho... 136 reviews, all of the same general format, all 5 star reviews, nothing critical in any of them.

pcurve 9y ago
https://www.fakespot.com/product/bluetooth-earbuds-tenfly-wireless-headphones-headsets-stereo-in-ear-earpieces-earphones-with-noise-canceling-microphone-for-iphone-x-8-8plus-7-7plus-6s-samsung-galaxy-s7-s8-ios-android-smart-phones https://www.fakespot.com/product/bluetooth-earbuds-tenfly-wi...
- aphextron 9y ago
  Bookmarked, thanks
thisisit 9y ago
What I find interesting is that Amazon has been adding word cloud for the reviews. It helps in filtering and narrowing down the features. But it is missing on this page. Anyone know if there is any particular reason for that?

bob_theslob646 9y ago

An interesting comment from an employee from the company that gives the revenue estimate in the title. Apparently the number is somewhat accurate according to him.(https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/7mzib4/how_to_scam_200000_per_month_and_get_67882_all_5/dry5eir/ https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/7mzib4/how_to_scam_2...) > We round the numbers for our free users -- the estimate in this case is closer to $150,000 than 200,000 in Nov. Indeed, if Sensor Tower was estimating revenue based on ratings, the seemingly fake reviews and bot users would influence it. > However, the estimates are based on things like Category Rankings in the top charts, and other signal data. You can't get on top of the revenue charts with fake bot reviews -- real users have to spend real money. We work a lot on our models and data science to improve estimates accuracy, and a lot of developers and publishers share their data with us, so we feel pretty confident about the revenue estimates. So while we might be off by a few %, we feel very confident about the data! In comparison, top dating apps like Tinder make >20 million a month on iOS alone. > As you can see, the app has stayed on top of the grossing charts with a lot of consistency, and hasn't been removed from the app store. I know Apple works hard to remove apps that break their terms of service, but they might have not caught it (or are investigating) over the holidays. I know that Apple takes reports like this from the community seriously, and though it might look like they act slowly, they are likely investigate apps like this in detail.

jokoon 9y ago

Aren't there laws to protect consumers against that kind of scam? At that point, what would Apple respond? It seems it's not in Apple's interest to refund customers, and I wonder if they would sue the app maker and investigate fraudulent ratings. Funnily, that would also bring attention to fraudulent comments on net neutrality, and how nothing has been proven yet.

rightbyte 9y ago
Apple's getting a revenue share of any sold item in the store ... so. I guess the rational thing for them would be to prevent scams to make ppl less reluctant to shop there, but since there is no obvious short time benefit they hardly care. Compare this to all these "child bought 1000$ worth of Candy Crush items on father's card" etc.
CharlesW 9y ago
> I wonder if they would sue the app maker and investigate fraudulent ratings. Apple does investigate this and does take action, yes.[1] > "Almost 1,000 fraudulent reviews were detected across two accounts and 25 apps for this developer so we removed their apps and accounts from the App Store," an Apple spokesperson told iMore. "Warning was given in advance of the termination and attempts were made to resolve the issue with the developer but they were unsuccessful. We will terminate developer accounts for ratings and review fraud, including actions designed to hurt other developers. This is a responsibility that we take very seriously, on behalf of all of our customers and developers." [1] https://www.imore.com/whats-happening-dash-and-app-store https://www.imore.com/whats-happening-dash-and-app-store

orliesaurus 9y ago

Sounds like a sophisticated money laundering scheme - dump money in click farms and fake app purchasing, in exchange for climbing the charts and getting innocent/naive people to purchase at a faster rate. As you climb the charts your app gets more visibility and thus more eye from the innocent/naive purchasing population

progre 9y ago
Not likely. If I was laundering money I would rather have a low profile and spread the money over several apps while making sure that none of them end up on the top 30 list. Seems like a pretty straight forward scam: Get suckers to buy the app and an in-app subscription service with fake reviews.

makecheck 9y ago

It’s insulting to real developers of decent apps and games when obvious trash can make it onto the store so easily, remain there, and make money hand over fist, when other apps have to put up with scrutiny and back-and-forth rejections over trivial non-issues even in 2017. Right now, their “improved” App Store doesn’t even have what I would call a search engine. I can search for apps BY NAME and they still show up like #30 on the list below a whole pile of stuff that (I assume) only matches due to some weird random match of letters that happen to be in my search term. There is NO way to narrow the search category, NO filters (not even something so basic as “search only apps released in the last month”), etc. And every single iOS store issue is 1000x worse on the Mac store. They need to take that 30% cut and invest properly. And search problems wouldn’t be so bad if their top-X lists made any sense. Top grossing, really? Great way to see the same 10 apps for like 3 weeks in a row. “Limited Time Prices”? At this very moment on the Mac store, ALL TWELVE “Limited Time Prices” apps are LEGO games! What good is that?

ElCapitanMarkla 9y ago
“improved” App Store... it really is terrible. I used to quite often click through different categories looking at the top games / apps etc. Now I hardly bother going into it because its such a cluster fuck to navigate. * I will note though that I do like the editorial type landing page they added to the store during the big "improvement"
jcadam 9y ago
After experiencing what iOS 11 has done to my iPhone SE, I'm pretty sure the "Software Engineers" Apple employs these days can't tell the difference between obvious trash and legitimate attempts at useful, working software.
stingraycharles 9y ago
I'm not an app dev but a mere user, but I completely understand your frustrations. As a user, the discoverability of new apps is abysmal. I don't understand why Apple can't look at what Amazon etc are doing with their stores, and recommend me apps based on apps I'm using recently ? Whatever happened to Genius suggestions ? And why can't I filter for e.g. strategy games without IAP in the 5-10$ range ? It's terrible and i can only imagine how much this hurts devs. Apple really doesn't care about the long tail.

wellboy 9y ago

I know a guy who submitted apps with a comment, you get $300 if you can help me with some things. 9 out of 10 times it didn't work. But with 1 guy it worked and he promoted fake apps like this.

534b44a 9y ago

Having a dumb search functionality results in tons of blogs and forums discussing software that relates to their niches. The Netflix homepage for guests doesn't provide much information either. Anytime I search for the newest titles on google, I get the most updated top 10's. Good for SEO and keeps the people talking about stuff related to the platform.

drefanzor 9y ago

I'd still like to know 'how' they got all those reviews. Is there a warehouse full of people somewhere in China generating this, so-called 5-star review farmers?

CharlesW 9y ago
China and elsewhere, yes. You can Google "buy app store reviews" if you're curious.
muzani 9y ago
Fiverr sells them openly and a lot of the people at the top of Fiverr list used to purchase fake reviews for their Fiverr profile too. It's probably easier and more profitable than doing Mechanical Turk jobs.
Too 9y ago
https://mk0equediaiphjdq03ev.kinstacdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/clickfarm.jpg https://mk0equediaiphjdq03ev.kinstacdn.com/wp-content/upload...

austinl 9y ago

Here's another great article about a fake security app that was making ~$80,000/month. After selecting "Free trial", the app signed you up for a $99/month subscription. For a while, it was ranked #33 in Top Grossing for Business apps. Apple has since removed it, but there's plenty of apps like this still out there. As someone who has had apps rejected for fairly trivial reasons, stuff like this always frustrating. https://medium.com/@johnnylin/how-to-make-80-000-per-month-on-the-apple-app-store-bdb943862e88 https://medium.com/@johnnylin/how-to-make-80-000-per-month-o...