Fake AI-generated reviews, generally accompanied by five-star ratings, are flooding both mobile app stores and smart TV app stores, according to a new report from DoubleVerify, the digital media measurement company.
“DV’s Fraud Lab has seen a significant increase in apps with AI-powered fake reviews in 2024, identifying over three times the number compared to the same period in 2023,” the company says.
This isn’t the victimless crime it might seem. Bad apps with poor performance and often extremely heavy ad loads are gaining higher rankings on mobile app stores, which see the reviews and the ratings and assume the apps are higher quality than others. This makes it more likely that people searching for new apps will encounter them and download them.
And that brings new risks, the company says.
Some of these apps are fraudulent and attempt to hijack your phone, DoubleVerify says. The goal: running ads incessantly, even when your phone seems to be off. This generates revenue for the fraudsters while draining your battery.
DoubleVerify didn’t name any names, but says that its investigation found apps with “thousands of five-star ratings, where many are convincingly crafted by AI.” Fake ratings are nothing new in the App Store and Google Play, of course, but generative AI can make them seem more real and individual.
Fortunately the technology so far is imperfect, and the telltale “I’m sorry, but as an AI language model …” that has appeared in student essays and Amazon reviews and Twitter posts also shows up in some of these AI-generated fake reviews.
Interestingly, the scammers behind this appear to be letting their AI engines get lazy, as DoubleVerify also found smart TV apps with suspiciously duplicated and similar phrases across multiple reviews. All of them, of course, were four or five-star reviews.
In the streaming space, the company found fake reviews in connection with CycloneBot. CycloneBot generates fake streaming traffic in order to sell ads that no-one will see.
“AI-generated app reviews occur across all types of app stores, from mobile to streaming services,” says DoubleVerify. “DV’s analysis of a streaming app on a popular smart TV platform, for example, revealed that 50% of its reviews were fake.”
AI-generated fake reviews are likely a cost-saving mechanism for fraudulent app publishers. Fake reviews can cost $2.23, which is a significant check on how many an app publisher can buy.
An analysis of about a million reviews in 2023 found that as many as 25% of the top apps on Google Play in popular categories had suspicious reviews, while 17% of the top apps on the iOS App Store had similar issues. Games and Health and Fitness apps were particular offenders, likely because they can make significant amounts of money quickly when they get popular.
How do you know if an app you’re considering installing has fake reviews? DoubleVerify found five commonalities across many fake reviews:
- Same writing style across “different” reviewers
- Unusual formatting or syntax
- High ratings: four or five stars
- Every rating also has a written review, even when not required by the platform
- Reviewers are only present on one platform
The problem with this, of course, is that it requires a pretty in-depth analysis across multiple reviews and apps, which consumers are unlikely to do. And, as generative AI gets better and better over time, the “fakeness” of the reviews is likely to go away.
Which means app stores from companies like Apple and Google will need to invest more in ensuring that reviews are from actual, real human beings.
