Fraudsters and scammers on Google Play seem to have found another way to make their deceptive applications seem more worthy of user confidence at least when viewed at first sight.
The trick is next to the application icon and its name is another element the user sees when browsing applications, the developer's name and the name displayed directly below the application name. Because anonymous developer names are not used to promote popularity, some application administrators have prepared large numbers of applications with numbers High number of downloads as well as the names of their developers in an attempt to look like applications are well-established developers and have a very large number of users.
We've discovered hundreds of apps that use these and similar tricks to fool users, and the apps we've analyzed are either misleading users about their jobs or have no functionality at all, and most of them usually show ads.
Significantly, the freedom to assign any number of choices as developers has inspired some greed. For example, a gaming app developer wants to make users believe his games have been installed by other users more than five billion times. In the category "1,000,000,000+", this category includes Google Play, G mail, Facebook, Yahoo! and others.
In certain cases, we noticed that the developer has changed its name from a fake developer name to a real developer name over time, which may indicate the use of the trick as a temporary measure intended to enhance the popularity of recently uploaded applications.
In addition to using fake install numbers to try to manipulate users to download their applications, some application authors have used legitimate terms such as Legit Applications, Verified Applications, and Trusted Developers App, some of which also contain On a check mark icon, similar to those used as "verified" tags for known character and brand accounts on different social media sites, and are included differently in app icons and names, as well as developer names, and because Google Play probably does not provide verification From the developers account Software, any application that uses such a mark must be considered suspicious.
How can you stay safe
The tricks described in this article are simple but potentially effective ways to mislead users, especially those who choose applications based on popularity. Although none of these applications were completely malicious, these techniques can be easily misused by malware authors In the future, fortunately, the tricks are also simple, if you know what to focus on:
Make sure that the number of installs per application is taken from the app page in Google Play only, because this is the official number, and this will be visible in the "More Information" section at the bottom of the page.
Keep in mind that Google Play does not have a "verification" badge that indicates the legitimacy of applications, but contains an " Editor's Choice " category with an "Editor's Choice" badge in the top-right corner of the Google Play app page.
Be sure to read user reviews before you download an app.
If your app has only a few real installs, or has been released only in the last few days, leave it no matter how you want that app