HN Explorer

How to spot a $5M/year scam on the App Store, in 5 minutes flat

39 points by egocentric ↗ HN
Up to now, I've been in the "Apple wants to do the right thing" camp. But my viewpoint is starting to change.

Here's how I spotted this $5M/year scam in 5 minutes flat.

First, the ratings of this app: 4.6 stars, with over 83,146 ratings, and a glowing 5-star "featured" review.

Let's dig in with AppFigures and look at the star breakdown of just the reviews - there's 835 of them:

5-stars: 109

4-stars: 6

3-stars: 9

2-stars: 31

1-stars: 680

Their average stars?

1.6

ONE. POINT. SIX.

In these reviews, people are desperately trying to warn others not to make the same mistake they did:

"DO NOT PURCHASE"

"PREDATORY COMPANY"

"Thieves Stay Away"

"Hard to believe these reviews are genuine"

"BAIT AND SWITCH"

Let's look at their ratings over time: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EthbbYYVIAEWK9I?format=jpg&name=large

Blue line is new positive ratings per day. This is a completely unnatural pattern here, when overlaid with their download numbers, inferred by the app rankings: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ethbx8jUYAEtDGB?format=jpg&name=large

The featured 5-star review is there because the scammers made sure to also long press on it and mark it as "Helpful", alongside submitting all their fake, bought ratings.

This scam has been operating from Indonesia for years, although "operating" is giving it too much credit. The app was last updated in 2019, so they are literally sitting and collecting the stolen money.

When you download and open the app, you HAVE to start a $10/week subscription to proceed. UNREAL.

Apple is doing nothing. In fact, they're even sending the scammers a cool $400k per month.

The scam: https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/star-gazer/id1474038335

Their "website": http://textystories.com

Another image from their support website reads: "Life is wonderful, let our games be part of it!"

This is some utter BS. Honest developers are getting fooled by all sides. I am furious.

13 comments

[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 47.0 ms ] thread
ekurutepe
I'm sure Apple wants to do the right thing but they've set themselves up badly from the top down in this case: Tim Cook has been promising (and delivering) services revenue and subscriber count growth since 2016. If your employer says services revenue growth is the most important thing, people do respond to incentives even if they're aware of it or not.

I'm also sure they're aware of this and hopefully we'll see improvements soon. (no insider knowledge, just good old hopeful thinking)

aurizon
A crime gang, with one big crooked boss and 100,000++ minions carrying loot and giving vigorish
muzani
A part of me hopes that someone here gets inspired by this and does it, until Apple is forced to take action. There's a lot of dodgy behavior on the App Store anyway, but much of it is willing buyer, willing seller.
egocentric
I'm working on leveraging the entire public dataset of ratings & reviews to expose some of these scams in a systematic fashion.

I hope to announce more details soon.

Bakary
I don't want to inject needless cynicism, but why did you think that Apple was doing "the right thing" before and what exactly did that entail according to you? It just seems like strange to attribute those goals to a company specializing in Veblen goods.
egocentric
I've never thought Apple was a saint - they've always been a for-profit company.

But I've always thought they'd want to do the right thing with regards to this issue, because to do so is a win-win situation: they protect customers, and long-term generate more profit through increased consumer trust & spending on their brand.

This case, however, demonstrates to me that their policing system is so full of inexplicably large holes, that we have to go back to ask what it means to "want" to solve this problem.

It just doesn't seem they want to solve it that bad.

KDJohnBrown
Apple has become increasingly anti-consumer since Steve Jobs died. It turns out that once you’re the 800lb-gorilla, you no longer have to care about your customers.
alex_young
How does it have 4.6 stars on average? I don’t understand what that is supposed to represent now.
jshevek
I could be wrong, but I assumed it had the necessary number of (presumably fake) 5 star reviews that had no comments, and that the parent post was listing only those reviews that left comments.

Edit:

In other words, "reviews" below means "feedback with comments, excluding feedback without comments":

> look at the star breakdown of just the reviews - there's 835 of them

egocentric
When you rate an app, leaving a comment is optional - and most people only bother to rate rather than also write a review.

For scammers to hide their tracks, they need to make sure they also leave a comment in some fraction of their submitted fake ratings. Apparently these scammers were too lazy, or too cheap (it costs more money to buy fake reviews, because coming up with the text requires extra effort). They just bought an insane number of positive ratings, and since the average displayed on the App Store is from all ratings & reviews, they can manipulate it to their liking using just fake ratings.

Most other scammers are more sophisticated and definitely include fake reviews to make things look more realistic.

jsnell
In general, this doesn't seem like a great use of the HN self-post feature. If you feel this strongly about it, maybe write a blog post that can be formatted properly?

> they're even sending the scammers a cool $400k per month.

How can you tell that? Seems hard to believe.

> Honest developers are getting fooled by all sides.

I don't understand this part at all. It might be the case that a handful of normal users are getting scammed by this. But just what do "honest developers" have to do with this case?

egocentric
> In general, this doesn't seem like a great use of the HN self-post feature. If you feel this strongly about it, maybe write a blog post that can be formatted properly?

Thanks, I'll do that. I originally posted this on Twitter: https://twitter.com/keleftheriou/status/1357938977748078594

> How can you tell that? Seems hard to believe.

Tools like AppFigures can accurately estimate revenues from the official top grossing charts of the App Store. Here's a screenshot showing the app made ~ $211k this January alone: https://imgur.com/a/nTsePbX

The same developer has over 100 apps, although this one is their most "successful".

> I don't understand this part at all. It might be the case that a handful of normal users are getting scammed by this. But just what do "honest developers" have to do with this case?

I got tipped about this app by a small indie developer who has been severely impacted by this scam competitor. I have also experienced the same as a developer: https://twitter.com/keleftheriou/status/1356011069395755009?...

Also see this for how poorly Apple has reacted: https://twitter.com/keleftheriou/status/1356725674954788864?...

To better understand this, it helps to see how these people manipulate their ratings: https://boostyourapps.org

Screenshot of the above website: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EtZjqbmUcAA9sB2?format=jpg&name=...

Apple's marketing has very effectively convinced people that things like that aren't happening on their store:

“A safe and trusted place to discover and download apps” “We want you to feel good about using every single one of them” “No surprise purchases” “Moderators review worldwide App Store charts for quality and accuracy” “Removed over 60M user reviews that were considered spam”

I'm just trying to shine a light on all of this, because people have no idea about the extent to which this is going on.