Since I exposed this scam yesterday, its ratings have dropped dramatically. What happened?
(thread)
Apple removed some of the fake reviews, resulting in the drop. Great news, right? Not so fast.
There are 120 reviews for this app right now. Of those, 114 are 1-star reviews. The average review score?
1.1 stars ☠️
ONE POINT ONE.
As a reminder, the absolute floor is 1, not 0
*Nobody* is happy with this app. Most are accusing it of being a scam. Some of the ratings are probably fake too, “boosting” it to 2.4 stars.
Why does any of this matter?
The app is currently the #441 top grossing app across the entire App Store 🤯
To put this in perspective:
It’s grossing ~ half a MILLION dollars a month! This is more than apps like:
- Microsoft Word
- Microsoft OneDrive
- Google Drive
- Washington Post
- Fox News
- Reddit
- Bloomberg
- NBC Sports
- Grand Theft Auto
- NBA LIVE
- Monopoly
- DocuSign
- Udemy
- LastPass
- GoPro
In fact, almost every other app out of the 2 million App Store apps makes less money that this scam!
That Apple took a good look at this app & the developer’s practices and decided to keep it in their “walled garden” store, tells you all you need to know about where their motives lie.
WARNING: Another top-grossing VPN scam is on the @AppStore
Stay clear! 🚨
How to spot this $5M/year scam in 5 minutes flat: 👇
The app’s screenshots are pretty standard, while the description is riddled with typos - and almost feels like it’s *trying* to be a big unreadable wall of text:
The app has 4 stars with hundreds of ratings, and the featured review by “Corianna Patience” is totally singing its praises:
Solving the fake ratings issue would solve all of the various problems @_inside and @johnsundell mention here, other than the *really* good counterfeits.
If the ratings are 4.6 stars but all reviews together are 1.6 stars, you don't need any advanced AI to detect.
True ratings would deprive all these scams from their oxygen, and would allow people to come together and protect themselves without relying on a potentially biased decision from any single Apple reviewer.