Rewards App Freecash Accused of Fraudulently Manipulating App Store Rankings

In January 2026, a rewards app called Freecash hit No. 2 on the U.S. App Store's free apps chart [1]. Its TikTok ads promised users up to $35 an hour just for scrolling their feeds [5]. By February, Freecash had racked up nearly 6 million downloads globally in a single month, up from 876,000 in October 2025 [1][6]. On April 14, Apple pulled the app — but only after TechCrunch contacted the company for comment [1].

The gap between Freecash's meteoric rise and its eventual removal raises a set of uncomfortable questions: How did a previously banned app return to the store under a different developer account and climb to the top of the charts? Why did Apple's fraud detection systems, which the company says removed 143 million fraudulent reviews in 2024, fail to flag it for months [9]? And does the Freecash case expose a structural weakness in how app stores police their own marketplaces?

The Rise: From Obscurity to No. 2

Freecash is operated by Almedia GmbH, a German company that launched the platform in 2020 as a "get-paid-to" service — users complete tasks like surveys, game installs, and offer walls in exchange for small cash rewards [4]. The web version had built a sizable audience, claiming over $73 million in total payouts and a 4.8/5 rating on Trustpilot from more than 250,000 reviews [4].

The mobile app's trajectory was different. Almedia first submitted Freecash to the Apple App Store on March 24, 2024. Apple removed it roughly two months later, on June 13, 2024 [1][3]. The original app carried the developer ID com.freecash.twa [2].

What happened next is central to the controversy. A separate app called "Rewards," developed by the Cyprus-based company 256 Rewards Ltd, was rebranded as "Freecash" approximately five months before its chart-topping run [2][3]. The updated app carried a different developer ID (com.freecash.app2) and contained the same core functionality as the banned original [2]. Using another developer's account to re-enter the App Store after a ban is a known tactic — and a direct violation of Apple's developer agreement [3].

The growth that followed was explosive. According to data from Appfigures, the app analytics firm, Freecash's monthly downloads across Apple and Google's stores went from 876,000 in October 2025 to 5.5 million in January 2026 and nearly 6 million in February [1][6].

Source: Appfigures via TechCrunch

Data as of Apr 14, 2026CSV

The engine behind this growth was a flood of TikTok advertisements. The ads featured creators who appeared to earn money by passively scrolling TikTok, with some clips styled to look like organic content rather than paid promotions [5][6]. Several ads falsely implied that TikTok itself was hiring users to watch content [6]. TikTok eventually removed some of the ads after the cybersecurity firm Malwarebytes published an investigation in January 2026 [5][7].

What Users Actually Got

The promise — passive income for scrolling social media — bore little resemblance to the product. Users who downloaded Freecash did not get paid for watching TikTok. Instead, the app directed them to install and play mobile games like Monopoly Go and Disney Solitaire, earning small rewards for completing in-game milestones [1][3]. The real money flowed in the other direction: Freecash functioned as a user-acquisition broker, matching game developers with players likely to spend money on in-app purchases [1].

Almedia's CEO has spoken publicly about using past spending data to steer users toward game genres where they are most "valuable" to advertisers [1]. Malwarebytes flagged an additional concern: Freecash's privacy policy permits the automatic collection of data about users' race, religion, sexual orientation, sex life, health status, and biometrics [5][7]. The cybersecurity firm described Freecash as "essentially a data broker" [5].

A separate Malwarebytes investigation in February 2026 traced a fake cloud storage payment alert through a chain of deceptive affiliate redirects that terminated at Freecash's sign-up page — suggesting the platform was also benefiting from scam-driven referral traffic beyond its own ad campaigns [8].

The Removal — and What Took So Long

Apple removed Freecash on April 14, 2026, citing violations of App Store Review Guidelines 3.1.2(a) and 2.3.1, which prohibit scam practices, bait-and-switch tactics, and misleading marketing [3]. An Apple spokesperson confirmed the removal after TechCrunch's inquiry [1].

The timing is notable. Freecash had occupied top chart positions for roughly three months before Apple acted. During that period, Malwarebytes published two separate reports on the app's deceptive practices [5][8], and Appfigures published a detailed analysis of its suspicious rise [6]. The app accumulated millions of downloads from users who encountered its misleading ads.

Apple's own transparency data shows the scale of its anti-fraud operations: in 2024, the company terminated more than 146,000 developer accounts, removed over 37,000 apps for fraud, and blocked nearly 2 million risky app submissions [9]. It processed 7.7 million app submissions and rejected 1.9 million of them [9]. Over five years, Apple says it prevented more than $9 billion in fraudulent transactions [9].

Source: Apple Newsroom

Data as of May 27, 2025CSV

Yet Freecash — a previously banned app that returned under a different developer identity, ran deceptive advertising at scale, and collected highly sensitive personal data — reached the No. 2 chart position without triggering an automated response. Apple's machine learning filters are designed to flag bulk submissions from similar accounts, reviews posted immediately after install, and coordinated rating activity [10]. None of these systems caught Freecash before a journalist's phone call did.

The Developer Account Shell Game

The use of the Cyprus-based 256 Rewards Ltd as a vehicle for re-entering the App Store after a ban represents a specific, documented category of manipulation. Apple's guidelines explicitly prohibit developers from using alternate accounts to circumvent enforcement actions [10]. Google maintains similar rules [11].

This tactic has historical precedent. A 2020 BuzzFeed News investigation found that Sensor Tower, the app analytics firm, had secretly operated at least 20 apps — including VPNs and ad blockers — that collected user data through root certificates, with a dozen of those apps previously removed from Apple's store for violations [12]. The apps kept returning under different developer identities. The pattern is consistent: a banned entity acquires or repurposes an existing developer account to maintain access to the marketplace.

In Freecash's case, the rebranding of an existing app ("Rewards" by 256 Rewards Ltd) into "Freecash" with Almedia's functionality represents a variant of this approach — one that exploits the fact that app store review processes focus primarily on new submissions rather than updates to existing apps [3].

Platform Policy vs. Platform Practice

Both Apple and Google explicitly prohibit incentivized reviews and rank manipulation. Apple's developer guidelines state that any attempt to "manipulate reviews, inflate chart rankings with paid, incentivized, filtered, or fake feedback" may result in expulsion from the Apple Developer Program [10]. Google has announced systems specifically designed to punish developers caught manipulating placement with fraudulent installs and incentivized ratings [11].

The enforcement record, however, suggests these policies function more as deterrents than as active prevention mechanisms. A 2020 academic study published at the ACM Internet Measurement Conference documented the prevalence of incentivized installs on Google Play, finding that the practice remained widespread despite official prohibitions [13]. Developers who implement incentivized reviews "cleverly" can evade automated detection, and the reviews they generate are "extremely valuable," according to analysis from app store optimization experts [10].

Apple removed 143 million fraudulent reviews in 2024 — a number that simultaneously demonstrates the scale of the problem and the scale of Apple's response [9]. But the Freecash case illustrates a gap: the company's systems are optimized for catching individual fake reviews and bot-generated ratings, not for detecting an app whose entire user-acquisition strategy is built on deception at the advertising layer.

The Legal Landscape

Freecash's practices intersect with several regulatory frameworks. The FTC's Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials, which took effect on October 21, 2024, prohibits businesses from providing compensation conditioned on favorable reviews [14]. Violations carry penalties of up to $51,744 per incident [14]. The rule does not prohibit all incentivized reviews — businesses can offer incentives for reviews generally — but it does ban conditioning those incentives on positive sentiment [15].

Whether Freecash's model constitutes a violation depends on specifics that remain unclear from public evidence. If the app rewarded users for leaving positive ratings (as opposed to simply installing games), that would fall squarely within the FTC's prohibition. Deceptive advertising claims — like promising $35/hour for scrolling TikTok — may separately trigger FTC enforcement under its broader authority over unfair and deceptive practices.

In the EU, Almedia GmbH would fall under the Digital Services Act and GDPR. The collection of data about users' race, religion, sexual orientation, and health status triggers heightened protections under GDPR Article 9, which governs "special categories" of personal data and generally prohibits their processing without explicit consent [5]. No public record indicates that regulators in any jurisdiction have opened a formal inquiry into Almedia or Freecash as of April 2026.

The Steelman Case

Almedia has denied wrongdoing. The company stated that its "apps are fully compliant with the Apple App Store and Google Play Store policies" and denied using deceptive marketing techniques [1][3]. There is a version of this argument worth taking seriously.

Freecash's core model — paying real users real money to install and play real games — is not inherently fraudulent. User-acquisition campaigns are a multi-billion-dollar industry. Game developers routinely pay platforms like ironSource, Unity Ads, and AppLovin to drive installs, and those platforms use targeted advertising that can look quite aggressive. Apple and Google themselves sell promoted placements — Apple Search Ads and Google App Campaigns — that directly influence which apps appear at the top of search results [10].

The line between "paid user acquisition" and "rank manipulation" is blurrier than either platform's policies suggest. When a game studio buys 100,000 installs through Apple Search Ads, those installs boost the app's ranking. When a rewards platform drives 100,000 installs by paying users directly, those installs also boost the app's ranking. The first is sanctioned; the second is prohibited. The functional difference is that Apple collects revenue from one and not the other.

This does not excuse Freecash's deceptive advertising, its apparent circumvention of a prior ban, or its aggressive data harvesting. But it does highlight an asymmetry in how platforms define and enforce "manipulation" — an asymmetry that tends to favor practices from which the platforms profit.

Harm to Competitors

Freecash's rapid ascent to the top of app store charts displaced legitimate competitors in search results and category rankings. Established rewards platforms like Mistplay, Swagbucks, and JustPlay compete for the same users — people looking to earn small amounts of money through mobile activities [16]. When a single app dominates chart positions through deceptive means, competing apps lose visibility in browsing and search results.

No competing app has publicly quantified lost downloads or revenue attributable to Freecash's chart manipulation during the October 2025–April 2026 period. The harm is structurally real — app store algorithms reward momentum, so an app that reaches No. 2 through deceptive advertising continues to attract organic downloads from users who discover it through chart browsing — but specific damage figures remain unavailable. The rewards app category is crowded, and isolating the impact of one competitor's manipulation from broader market dynamics is difficult.

What This Reveals About Platform Integrity

The Freecash episode fits a pattern. App store gatekeepers invest heavily in fraud prevention — Apple's $9 billion figure over five years is real [9] — but their enforcement systems are reactive rather than preventive when it comes to sophisticated manipulation that operates at the advertising and user-acquisition layer rather than the review-and-rating layer.

There are structural incentives that cut against aggressive enforcement. Both Apple and Google collect a 15–30% commission on in-app purchases made by users who arrive through any channel, including deceptive ones [9]. A high-grossing app that drives in-app spending generates platform revenue regardless of how its users were acquired. Removing such an app carries a direct financial cost to the platform.

This does not mean Apple or Google deliberately ignored Freecash. The more likely explanation is simpler: their automated systems are designed to catch fake reviews and bot installs, not to evaluate the truthfulness of TikTok ad campaigns or to detect when a banned developer has returned under a new identity. These are gaps in capability, not necessarily in intent.

But after three months at the top of the charts, millions of downloads, and multiple published investigations by cybersecurity firms and app analytics companies, the fact that removal required a journalist's phone call suggests those capability gaps are significant. Apple's fraud statistics are impressive in aggregate. The Freecash case shows what falls through.

Almedia's Response and What Comes Next

Almedia has blamed third-party affiliates for the deceptive TikTok ads and maintained that its platform operates within app store rules [1][6]. The company has not publicly addressed how its app returned to the App Store under a different developer account after its 2024 removal.

As of April 15, 2026, Freecash remains available on Google Play [1]. The web version at freecash.com continues to operate. No regulatory body has announced an investigation, though the FTC's expanded authority over deceptive endorsements and the EU's GDPR provisions on sensitive personal data both provide potential enforcement pathways.

The app's removal from Apple's store does not resolve the broader questions the case raises. Platform integrity systems that catch 143 million fake reviews but miss a top-charting app running deceptive ads for three months are systems optimized for volume, not for the kind of coordinated manipulation that poses the greatest risk to marketplace trust. Until Apple and Google close the gap between their policies and their enforcement capabilities — particularly around developer identity verification and advertising-layer deception — the playbook Freecash used will remain available to the next app willing to run it.