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Mobile app stores, such as Google Play, play a vital role in the ecosystem of mobile apps. When users look for an app of interest, they can acquire useful data from the app store to facilitate their decision on installing the app or not. This data includes ratings, reviews, number of installs, and the category of the app. The ratings and reviews are the user-generated content (UGC) that affect the reputation of an app. Unfortunately, miscreants also exploit such channels to conduct promotional attacks (PAs) that lure victims to install malicious apps. In this paper, we propose and develop a new system called PADetective to detect miscreants who are likely to be conducting promotional attacks. Using a dataset with 1,723 of labeled samples, we demonstrate that the true positive rate of detection model is 90%, with a false positive rate of 5.8%. We then applied PADetective to a large dataset for characterizing the …