Same issue. Nothing has worked so far.

Removing VALID_ARCHS from the build settings (left over from my XCode11) and then excluding arm64 when building for the simulator solved this for me.

Same problem here.

Did anyone find out how to do this?

There are only two apps in my screenshot. Further up there are quite a few ads.

I'm trying the "Contact Us" inside Appstoreconnect first with the category of fraud. I haven't had much luck discussing issues in the past tho' - I usually get a reply telling me to do the stuff that I have already said to them that I have done.

Thank you.

This is a technique used by malicious developers to kill your app. The installs kill your apps' retention values etc and make it rank lower for the keyword used to get the install. I do not know this for fact as there is no way to prove it, but my chess app has been ruined by such spikes eg 2 days ago 11000 downloads from Vietnam when I usually get a few hundred. Apple do seem really interested in investigating. Hopoefully they will remove the bogus units from my stats

This is a scam IMHO. A rival will buy installs of your app for a chosen keyword to destroy your benchmarks. In turn this will affect your ranking in the store and future success. My app appears to be ruined by these practices. It used to be #1 for it's keyword in most countries, and now it can't even rise above a 3 star app (see pic). My retention dropped from around 30% to 1/2 a %, because the downloads aren't real.

Did your retention take a hit?

This happened to me the other day. Report it to Apple as fraud. It's a way to destroy your app by killing engagement etc. Here you can see the effect it had on my app.

This has been happening to most of my apps for a while but I never picked up on it. My Brain School app has had tonnes of zombie downloads too. Revenue overall has dropped 90%. I've been told Apple won't do anything and to go to the press but I just want to create apps and have a level playing field. For a couple of $1000 you can destroy each of your rivals. Meanwhile search ads is affected too and you will just get "you need to spend more money" responses from Apple Search Ads :( I've wasted a small fortune on them but my app is stuck at 24 below a 3 star app with a handful of ratings when it used to be #1. Apple actually benefit from the scam because you end up throwing a tonne of $$$ at search ads which will never work.

I just checked and this has happened at least 7 times to Chess in just 2 years.

They could target paid apps I guess, but it would be expensive.

Has anyone heard anything back from Apple? This is a $1,000,000,000 scam at the very least as developer's are throwing $$$ at Search Ads that will never work, not to mention lost ranking and revenue loss from that.