Cheetah and Kika Apps Was Accused Of 'Ad Fraud'

Parvati Divakar - Dec 01, 2018

An app analytics company discovered Cheetah Mobile and Kika Tech was involved in ad-fraud.

Some apps on the Google Play Store were alleged to involve in an ad-fraud, according to Buzzfeed News. To be more specific, there are eight apps, namely Clean Master, CM Launcher 3D, CM File Manager, Battery Doctor, Security Master, Cheetah Keyboard, CM Locker, and the Kika Keyboard.

Cheetah Mobile which is the 4th largest publisher in the Google play store, as well as the Apple app store, is responsible for seven out of eight apps which had involved in this case. The remain app, which has 60 million monthly active users, belongs to another Chinese company, Kika Tech. In total, these apps have more than 700 million active users each month and more than 2 billion downloads.

Kochava, an app analytics company shared with Buzzfeed News that the two companies illegally exploited the user's right to steal millions of dollars. It's reported that these apps request permission to access user data, along with the ability to track keystrokes as well as other downloaded apps.

Kochava says that these apps were tracking other apps that users who had installed onto their phones and allowed them to take credit claim the bounty for referring the user of that app to this other app that they installed.

In fact, many app developers have to pay a fee to their partners who can promote their apps. And by using click injection and click flooding techniques. Cheetah and Kika can get bounties for app installation, even if they are not relevant to app installations.

Bill Hu, Kika Tech CEO, said that the company was not entirely aware of the fraud. Also, Kika Tech was carrying out an investigation into the incident and would fix this if it were due to a coding error.

Plus, Cheetah Mobile stated that the click injection was attributed to third-party SDKs, software development kits. The company said that it requested ads through SDK from thóe ad platform and showed their ads. But they don't control SDKs' behaviors.

It is notable that Google recently advertised one of these apps as "go-to app" on Google Play.