In China, if you don’t know what the slang word “shuabang” means, you are definite out of the loop. It is the hottest topic in the Chinese mobile marketing circle nowadays.

Shuabang is an ASO industry and considered one of the most troubling gangs of system gamers who specialized in providing Black Hat ASO services. Typically, they sell installs and user ratings to app developers to help boost their profile.

Shuabang Blackhat Methods for iOS

Shuabang practitioners have created millions of phantom Apple iTunes accounts

They offer new downloads, ratings or whatever measurements required to manipulate the numbers.

Shuabang is a sport, and it isn’t a cheap one. Shuabang fees start at $1,500 to get into a top 100 list — a top 10 listing costs as much as $10,000 per day. Pretty expensive eh?

When you hire a service, the company hire and subcontract 150 to 200 agents who will log in to iTunes using the Shuabang company’s millions of iTunes accounts to download and review the apps as often as is needed to fulfill your order.

If they failed to deliver — be it downloads, the desired ranking or the period over which the ranking is maintained — your money will be refunded. No questions asked.

Shuabang methods include: administrative services examples, boosting ratings all at once in just a couple of hours, doing it on a Friday to maximize exposure during the weekends or spreading it out over a month, yanking ratings up whenever they slip.

Shuabang Blackhat Methods for Android

They create Widgets to automatically download apps in order to get higher rankings in Android app stores. Also, it’s no secret that many Chinese Internet companies have been secretly installing apps, or misleading users to uninstall competing ones on users’ PCs or, more recently, mobile Android devices without their knowledge.

They create thousands of “Shanzhai” apps, spinoffs or knockoffs. No matter how many users those knockoffs can get, they carry ads or have in-app paid offerings. To attract users, lots of knockoffs use pictures of sexy models as app icons or take various shady tactics to tricking users into downloading those apps.

They secretly side load Android apps into users’ devices that have rats. One compromised Android device must be very busy at night downloading all kinds of apps, opening them, and then uninstall them before their masters wake up in the morning. Shady ops go so far as to make purchases with users’ online banking accounts.

Sources:

http://anewdomain.net/2012/12/10/united-mobile-games-shuabang/
http://www.huxiu.com/article/3838/1.html
http://digi.tech.qq.com/a/20120920/001795.htm
http://money.163.com/12/0912/10/8B6NRNFU00253G87.html
http://www.donews.com/original/201209/1663769.shtm
http://www.ittime.com.cn/index.php?m=content&c=index&a=show&catid=29&id=1878
http://www.leiphone.com/news/201406/appstore-shuabang.html
http://182.92.80.191/Reports.htm
http://www.slideshare.net/elevenpaths/shuabang-with-new-techniques-in-google-play