It's strange, how does this extension do that?

[Dream Kuang]

An extension has only been online for about 3 months, I found some very strange data, so many users, only so little star rating, how is it done?  fake users?

[PhistucK]

There are many similar instances, from what I understand. They probably use services that make Google think the extension was installed on many devices but those are probably not actual users. They cheat.

☆PhistucK

On Thu, Jan 14, 2021 at 3:53 AM Dream Kuang <shuha...@gmail.com> wrote:

An extension has only been online for about 3 months, I found some very strange data, so many users, only so little star rating, how is it done?  fake users?

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[馮韋元]

I would like to understand, from the Chrome store perspective, how those extensions can not be flagged immediately?

They are often mentioned in this group.

Consider an extension that have all the following:

- very few actual users landing on the chrome store page

- extension usage only a fraction of the total weekly users

- install/uninstall rate extremely high or total weekly users rising by the thouands

- installs coming from the same IP or a limited set of IPs

There should be an easy way to automatically build a tool monitoring/flagging extensions that behave in a way that is not standard in terms of installs/uninstalls/pageviews/usage.

Those extensions listing millions of users, there are not that many of them on the store. Something can be done