Abstract
As the mobile era matures, it is increasingly competitive to market mobile apps, forcing companies to invest heavily on mobile user acquisition campaigns. This has unfortunately given birth to a new form of Internet fraud, which we refer to as “app distribution fraud”. This new fraud involves collusion between ISPs and fraudulent app distributors where app download is hijacked/redirected. In this article, we have the unique opportunity to cooperate with a major e-commerce company (with about 0.2 billion active users per month) to take a first peek at this problem. Through the nationwide measurement results, we find that app distribution fraud is ubiquitous yet stealthy — about 1.55 percent app downloads are hijacked/redirected, affecting more than 75 percent of the cities we tested and causing an estimated 7.46 billion U.S. dollars financial loss per year. We follow up with additional measurements on the technical mechanism of the fraud and the scope of the fraud (i.e., what other apps are also affected). Surprisingly, we find that sometimes the original app a user intends to download can be replaced with a completely different app, rendering the user's device at risks.
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