it helped one of my websites improve the rankings last year when I've purchased fake traffic from fiverr for $5, but not by much. One week into the traffic campaign running and a couple of the keywords went from page 6 to page 2 or something like that (I don't really remember the exact numbers and pattern), but after 1 month - when my traffic package had expired - those keywords have reverted back to their initial positions.
Logically, fake traffic should work if it's done right (coming in from sites like reddit, facebook, forums, paid ads, etc.). I mean, these sources are very legit in google's eyes and if you can find a way to get fake traffic from these sources that doesn't look like fake you can clearly deceive even the almighty google, as I have clearly done last year. But you will probably have to do it continuously, and it probably works only up until a certain point. Probably that once you reach page 1 of google based off fake traffic alone the ranking factors change considerably and authority, relevance, strong backlinks and content quality play a much bigger role
