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:
Sliding over to the next review, an overly thrilled “Yoshiaki Lodwick” is also giving it 5 stars. Who could have thought people would be so excited about a VPN app?
The next review is a total oddity. “GIVES YOU VIRUSES” says the title, but it’s rated 5-stars “so people could see how bad it was”. Some alarm bells are starting to go off.
In the app, the first screen is their “Private” policy. Oddly, tapping the only available “Accept” button asks us if we are sure about this. With such great ratings, let’s see where that takes us.
Another typo in the title, but this time it’s not even a title - it’s PLACEHOLDER TEXT!

How the heck does this app have a 4-star rating? Or passed review twice??

Anyway, let’s continue to see what this “7 day” trial is all about.
On the next screen the trial is now for 3 days instead of 7, and we can “Incredibly increase speed” for a mere $12/week.

You’re telling me people are signing up for $624/year for *this*? And are giving it 4 stars?

Wait a minute! ✋
Let’s take a closer look at the reviews:

It seems the developer is running ads that trick users into thinking they have a virus.

People are trying to warn others.

“Hopefully Apple can take this app down before many people fall for this trick”, says one review from last year.
So how on earth does this app have a 4-star rating?

Take a look at these streams of glowing 5-star reviews, many appearing on the exact same day.

Notice how they all have roughly the same length, and non-sensical author names - all with the same “First Last” name format:
Even users can see through these totally fake reviews, yet Apple can’t - or won’t: “a pattern from all the fake 5 star reviews. I say fake be
Keep in mind this is a *VPN* app - where security is paramount.

As part of their ongoing legal battle with Epic, Apple recently told the court: “Apple conducts a robust app review before apps are published.”

🤥
While Apple practices their security theater, scammers simply buy fake App Store ratings & reviews left and right.

It’s really easy!

This page will be an eye-opener for most people:

quora.com/What-are-the-b…
“Apple can’t be perfect”, I hear you say. “There are over 2M apps on the App Store!”

Well, with over $1.4M revenue so far, this app has become the #350 highest grossing app across the *entire* App Store, with a $5M/year run rate.

Data from @Appfigures:
To give you an idea, that’s more recurring revenue 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
- Facetune
- MasterClass
- Procreate Pocket
- Motionleap, Lightleap, Photoleap
- Evernote

…and many, many more.

In fact, this scam makes more money than almost every other app out of 2 million App Store apps!
It gets worse. This developer is a repeat offender inside Apple’s “walled garden”.

They had *another* VPN scam that netted them over half a MILLION dollars before it was shutdown early 2020.

But now knowing Apple’s lack of punishment they’re even more brazen & more profitable.
This is only one of many multi-million dollar App Store scams that sometimes run unchecked for *years*. Apple doesn’t even bother scrutinizing the top grossing apps for the security of their own customers:
And it’s not just that they don’t bother.

They even go out of their way to make it *harder* to spot these scams: They literally removed the “Report a problem” button they used to have on each app’s App Store page!
So why does Apple allow this to happen?

“The answer turns out to be as simple as it is depressing: Apple's App Store was never designed to work. At least not in the way the company purports that it does.”

world.hey.com/dhh/the-app-st…
Follow me for more, and keep sending me scams at bunco.squad@hey.com

See you next time! ✌️
Join the discussion on Hacker News: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=268090…
And *another* top-grossing VPN scam from last week:
Another top-grossing scam from a few days ago:

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More from @keleftheriou

13 Apr
How it started / how it’s going.

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:
Read 6 tweets
12 Apr
You think the @AppStore is “a place you can trust”?

🚨Think again!🚨

How to spot a $5M/year scam, in 5 minutes flat:👇
This app has 4.1 stars with over 1,000 ratings, and a really nice 5-star featured review:
Let’s slide over to the next reviews, which are not immediately visible:
Read 19 tweets
12 Feb
What Apple doesn’t want you to know about the App Store👇

“The apps you love, from a place you can trust” they tell you. But the reality is far from it.

A 4.5-star app? Might as well be a multi-million dollar scam.

How, you ask?

1/🧵
The average star rating of an app can be *trivially* manipulated by any developer.

Really. Just take a look at this eye-opener of a Quora page:

quora.com/What-are-the-b…
But Kosta, I hear you say. Apple would just take down any app that did that!

Well, no. That might be true in some cases, but scams can go undetected for *years*:

Read 37 tweets
11 Feb
So Apple finally publicly responded to my complaints.

Let's take apart this embarrassingly generic boilerplate statement the gave to The Verge: In a statement given to The Verge, Apple defended the safegu
"investigate and take action on each report"

The most I got out of their official channels when reporting a competitor using "FlickType Keyboard" as the *name* of their subscription IAP?

Competitor changed it to "Type: Flick my keyboard".

Apple considered this "resolved". 🤦
"The App Store is designed to be a safe and trusted place"

Notice how they say "is designed to be" - because they can't say "is".

With so many rampant scams plaguing the store for years unnoticed, how could they say "is"?
Read 11 tweets
10 Feb
Since Apple seems to be cool with this scam remaining on their App Store, let's look at another app from the *same* developer.

This one has stolen "only" $1M so far...

How?

1/🧵
Enter "Truth or Dare⋆". No, the little asterisk at the end is not a typo, just a shitty ASO dark pattern.

apps.apple.com/US/app/id13976…
Searching for "Truth of Dare", we see their ad at the top. Because the scam is so profitable, they can afford to pay a lot for that. Image
Read 33 tweets
10 Feb
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.
Also, a huge discrepancy between star rating and refund volume should raise a huge flag.

This scam has been up for years, and is *still* up after all this exposure.

Is Apple even listening?

Nobody would ever be downloading a 1.6 star app.

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.
Read 4 tweets

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