  In this work, we are focusing on a new and yet uncovered way for malicious
apps to gain profit. They claim to be dating apps. However, their sole purpose
is to lure users into purchasing premium/VIP services to start conversations
with other (likely fake female) accounts in the app. We call these apps as
fraudulent dating apps. This paper performs a systematic study to understand
the whole ecosystem of fraudulent dating apps. Specifically, we have proposed a
three-phase method to detect them and subsequently comprehend their
characteristics via analyzing the existing account profiles. Our observation
reveals that most of the accounts are not managed by real persons, but by
chatbots based on predefined conversation templates. We also analyze the
business model of these apps and reveal that multiple parties are actually
involved in the ecosystem, including producers who develop apps, publishers who
publish apps to gain profit, and the distribution network that is responsible
for distributing apps to end users. Finally, we analyze the impact of them to
users (i.e., victims) and estimate the overall revenue. Our work is the first
systematic study on fraudulent dating apps, and the results demonstrate the
urge for a solution to protect users.
