Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Fraudulent Apps Found In Apple's Store

Posted by samzenpus on from the one-bad-apple dept.

snydeq writes Angry support queries citing problems with mystery iOS apps has led InfoWorld's Simon Phipps to discover the existence of several scamware apps in Apple's App Store. "If you're a scammer looking to make a fast buck, it appears that [Apple's App Store] process can be defeated," Phipps reports. "The questions originated from a support link for a $2.99 app in Apple's iTunes Store," which pointed angry customers to the Apache OpenOffice community, which doesn't even have an iOS app. The app in question, Quickoffice Pro, "simply displays a gray screen with the word Tap. When you tap the screen, the app exits." Further investigation has uncovered two other scam apps thus far.

5 of 89 comments (clear)

  1. This is news.... because? by bhlowe · · Score: 5, Interesting

    2 lameware apps out of 1.2 million apps? I'm guessing people will get over it.

  2. Hmmm.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    "A developer that we hired as a freelance third party vendor published this app under my personal Apple developer account without permission or my knowledge. I take app fraud very seriously and will have the app removed as soon as possible."

    Surely he would have noticed sales from this app appearing in his account. So where does the money go ?
    I smell something bovine.

  3. It does what? by SeaFox · · Score: 5, Interesting

    How does an app with no functionality get through the approval process to start with? This isn't a case of the app having a secret feature of calling home or installing malware. I mean, if it doesn't do anything how could anyone have reviewed the app to begin with?

  4. Re:Security? by v1 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    not prevented, just greatly reduced.

    Though even just looking at raw numbers isn't even fair. Apppl's store inventory dwarfs all of the others, and still numerically has fewer scams. It ought to work the other way around unless the wall is performing very effectively.

    But bottom line here is some reviewers just got fired, and those that remain were harshly threatened. Reminds me of the recent peer reviewed journals that got caught with some lazy reviewers rubber stamping to boost their productivity numbers.

    --
    I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
  5. Abandoned apps are worse by Neo-Rio-101 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    As the versions of iOS increase, many of the apps that I purchased don't even work anymore and are still on the app store.
    Perhaps the developer just forgot about them, or couldn't be bothered spending the time or money to update them to more current iOS versions.
    It seems that there are a lot of abandoned apps out there.

    --
    READY.
    PRINT ""+-0