New Google Warning: 280M+ Android Users At Risk As China ‘Manipulates’ Play Store

guest · Oct 3, 2019

New Google Warning: 280M+ Android Users At Risk As China ‘Manipulates’ Play Store
How to beat Google Play’s algorithm and get 280 million installs
October 2, 2019
https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdof...k-as-china-manipulates-top-vpns/#5fe723ff149b

But now there’s a twist, with new research finding that “the top 10 Google Play search results for ‘vpn’ are dominated by [Chinese] apps participating in potentially fraudulent manipulation practices.” And those apps have secured more than 280 million installs between them.

In short, the team claims to have “uncovered what appears to be a large scale operation by Chinese VPN service providers to manipulate Google Play store results—leading to millions of people using potentially unsafe VPNs.”
The VPNPro team found that “seven out of the top ten apps,” found to be manipulating the Google Play system, “are either based in Hong Kong, have Chinese directors, or are located in China.”

VPNPro “analyzed more than 150,000 reviews to understand how these unpopular VPN apps are able to rank so highly on Google Play,” [...] Again no real surprises, this is what you find with bot-driven, machined or production-line reviews.
While less obviously a driver of high rankings, the research team also discovered that those same VPNs had “multiple suspicious backlinks from unrelated websites or articles, unmoderated comments and pingbacks or trackbacks.”
Click to expand...

And this raises a serious question: why can such obvious tactics so easily manipulate the ranking system? “What’s more surprising isn’t that fraudulent backlinks still work to increase rankings. It’s that the ‘spammiest’ fraudulent backlinks seem to perform well in manipulating Google Play’s ranking algorithm

Sound advice. As is checking the VPNs installed on your devices against the list shared by the researchers and cleaning house as required.
Here’s the list of the free VPNs manipulating Google Play store search results to appear in the top ten for the keyword “vpn”:
Click to expand...

X-VPN

Secure VPN

FREE VPN

Turbo VPN

Betternet Hotspot VPN

VPN Proxy Master

Thunder VPN

SuperVPN

JustVPN

VPN 360

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New Google Warning: 280M+ Android Users At Risk As China ‘Manipulates’ Play Store

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