Google Play is Hit with a New Wave of Fake Reviews

Application and games reviews are incredibly important for an application store such as Google Play, and these can be the target of some malicious services. This issue is compounded when it’s an application store for the largest mobile platform in the world. In November of last year, Google talked about how they are improving the review and rating system within the Play Store. Google does a lot of work to keep this spam and bot activity at bay, but this is a never ending job.

This improvement was thanks to some work that they announced one month before in October. This involved detecting if an install happened with the intention to manipulate an app’s placement on Google Play. But since most systems like this are a cat and mouse game, the malicious entities are always finding a way around the latest protections. This is what we’ve been seeing in the Play Store over the last few weeks too. Multiple popular applications are getting 5-star reviews with comments that don’t match the application itself.

The Next Web took a small screenshot of some reviews for Messenger. All three of the reviews shown in this screenshot talked about games and how this game was so fun to play. But the review was placed on a messaging application, not a game at all. Multiple people within the community have been noticing this wave of reviews on high profile applications such as Gmail, WhatsApp, Messenger and more. Which is something that seems out of place at first glance.

These review and rating services that developers can buy to increase the popularity of their applications are generally done for very low quality games and applications. There isn’t a need for Facebook to pay for a bunch of spammy reviews for WhatsApp. However, some are speculating that these services are using their bots to build up a ‘profile’ in hopes that future reviews from them are not detected as spam. Reports say Google is being quite lenient about this issue, and while true, Google is likely taking this time to collect data on known bots so that detecting these instances becomes easier.

Source: The Next Web