Google Play Store Popular Apps Spotted With Fake Reviews
Most of you already know that fake reviews and rating is a very common issue for every online marketplace. Well, it seems that Google has a lot of work these days as its App Store has been flooded by these problems.
According to reports, bots are currently flooding the Google Play Store most popular applications with positive fake reviews. We have to mention that this issue has firstly been noticed in the middle on March 2017, when WhatsApp has received many positive reviews that contained some strange comments and praise such as ”entertaining game” and “fun.”
What was strange about all the reviews is that they were written terribly and tended to reference games, instead of a mobile messaging application. Well, now it’s time for other application get some fake positive reviews.
According to “The Next Web,” in the last month there have been many numbers of positive reviews posted for applications such as Gmail, Firefox, Google Chrome, Facebook Messenger mentioning words such as “Kind” or “game”. All the reviews that we’ve talked about have rated these applications with five stars.
There are also reports suggesting that the developers of these bots have started to hide better their “attacks,” by giving occasionally four star rates from time to time. It is speculated that the bots are targeting the popular applications in order to lend some legitimacy to the paid-for-review service that the owners of these bots are offering for less well known applications.
Google has not mentioned anything yet about this attack, but we’re pretty sure that it is already working on removing all the fake reviews. We remind you that back in October 2016, Google has punished applications and developers that have benefitted from paid reviews.
Back then, the search engine company has limited the visibility of these applications in both lists and rankings and has threatened that it will shut down the accounts that have submitted these apps entirely if this kind of abuse continue.