According to Atlas VPN investigation, interest in VPNs surged by 1150% in the Philippines due to a special mobile game offer.
While marking Brazil’s day of independence on September 7, 2020, Moonton, a mobile game developer, prepared a gift for Brazilians – multiple free skins on their mobile game – Mobile Legends. The promotion started over a week before Independence day, on August 30.
However, people from outside Brazil found out that by using a VPN, they can change their IP address to one that is in Brazil, and they will be able to receive the skins as well.
The first players to find the trick on how to get free skins were users from Indonesia, the Philippines, and Malaysia. In these countries, people started searching for the “VPN” keyword at record highs.
The highest increase in the interest in VPNs was seen in the Philippines, where the search popularity surged from 8 points to a record 100 points. In other words, the interest in the “VPN” keyword soared by 1150%.
Similarly, VPN interest in Indonesia increased from 31 points to 100. While the rise in interest is not as significant as in the Philippines, it still constitutes 222.58% growth.
Finally, in Malaysia, VPN interest jumped from 42 points to 100, which means that the “VPN” keyword’s interest jumped by 138.1%.
Even though not all regions are interested in the Mobile Legends game, the ones that are caused a significant spike looking when looking at Google Trends data globally.
The spike in VPN search queries globally started on August 30, 2020. The “VPN” keyword search interest jumped from 60 points to 100. Meaning, this was a 66.67% spike in just a few days
