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We have a new extension that we built for many months and is live on the webstore.

Our extension communicates with our API and we get many fake installs daily - installs that we see in our API and not in the web store.

After many sleepless nights - We suspect that a robot with chrome runs our extension and deletes the local storage every time - this is only our best guess, although we are not sure if it's likely because the IP of each installation is different.

There are many more details - so If you would like to help and need further info let me know what and I can elaborate.

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closed as not a real question by Will Jan 31 '13 at 16:27


1 Answer 1

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I'm not familiar with this Chrome extension API, BUT, if someone earns money by letting people install your extension then I'd check that lead.

Eventually, the clients (many IPs you say) that apparently "install" your extension report this event by making an HTTP request - again I only presume!
Saying that, it might be that someone controls many computers which simply initiate these HTTP requests to "report" a (fake) installation, thus making money.

If that is the case, and someone does make money out of your extension (could be also INDIRECTLY) then check the affiliate code or whatever, this is even an issue to report to Google itself, they can certainly investigate that.

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Thanks Poni - no one is making money from installing our app - we did start to see this behavior after advertising it though. So you might be right after all. Unfortunately we still get many installs everyday after we stopped adverting for a few days - we can't seems to find any way to determine if the installs are real or not - This is basically what I'm asking here... –  Bobbi X Jan 27 '13 at 21:53
What does you extension does? If it somehow reports something back to your server then you can evaluate by analyzing the users' activity (pay attention to users' privacy though!). In addition, if possible through the tools Google gives you as a vendor, you could also analyze the source URLs that the user(s) come from. If you'd be more specific on the overall process of how/to/where/etc' then I might have a better advice. In general, your problem is that the users download the extension from Google's servers rather than yours (otherwise you'd had higher degree of control/info), am I corrent? –  Poni Jan 27 '13 at 22:35
Also, HOW did you advertise it? It could be that the advertiser wants you to see high stats, for obvious reasons.. –  Poni Jan 27 '13 at 22:37
@BobbiX so what was it, eventually? –  Poni Jan 31 '13 at 11:18
