What You See Isn't Always What You Get
Wei Liu, Yueqian Zhang, Zhou Li, Haixin Duan · 2016
We studied a new type of fraudulent activities, usage fraud, on Android platform in this paper. Different from previous fraud on mobile platforms targeting advertisers or mobile users, usage fraud was invented to boost usage statistics on third-party analytics platforms like Google Analytics to cheat investors. To understand the business model and infrastructures employed by the fraudsters, we infiltrated two underground services, Laicaimao and Anzhibao. A number of insights have been gained during this course, including the use of emulators and manipulation of user identifiers. In addition, we evaluated the efficacy of the existing fraud services and the defense status quo on 8 popular analytics platforms. Our result indicates that the fraud services are indeed capable of crafting valid usage numbers and the basic checks are missed by analytics platforms. We give several recommendations in the end and call for the contribution from the community to fight against this new type of fraud.