It is a common trick. There are many culprits using same tricks: Gardenscape, Whiteout Survival, Frozen City, Township, Fishdom, Hero Wars and to some extent Royal Match.

All of these appear to enjoy a lot of downloads, so whatever tricks they are using works very effectively.

> All of these appear to enjoy a lot of downloads, so whatever tricks they are using works very effectively.

That's because "# of downloads" is a crap metric that's easily gamed (be it by fake ads or bot campaigns or whatnot). A more useful metric would be "# of installs still active after 1/2/4 weeks", that would disincentivize a lot of these scams, but at the cost of Google being able to claim download numbers for the vitality of their app store ("# of app installs a day!!!"), which is why Google doesn't do much against this shit despite the "quality" dragging down the image of the entire Play Store. Unfortunately there is no competition worth the name as the Apple Store is similarly plagued by copycats and fakes, so neither party has an incentive to de-enshittify.