Slashdot Mirror
Fake Shopping Apps Are Invading the iPhone (nypost.com)
An anonymous reader shares a NYPost report: For tech-focused scammers, knocking off sneakers and handbags is so last decade. Thieves in the digital age are slamming consumers right in the app. A slew of knockoff shopping apps have quietly infiltrated Apple's App Store in recent months, looking to lure unsuspecting iPhone owners with bogus deals on everything from jewelry to designer duds. The fake apps mimic the look of legit apps -- and have proliferated since this summer, experts said. It didn't help that earlier this month, Apple introduced search ads in its App Store. The fake apps are buying search terms, it would appear, to increase their exposure to consumers. The crooks are looking to tap into the fast-growing market for mobile sales, which last year leaped 56 percent to $49.2 billion, according to comScore.Further reading on NYTimes (NYTimes has opened its paywall till November 9).
I thought the walled garden was supposed to prevent this kind of stuff.
I don't know about you, but if I was going to be running this kind of a scam I would do everything possible to make sure each of my counterfeit shopping apps had a unique identifier as far as Apple was concerned.
That way you couldn't easily get all your apps blacklisted.
What puzzles me is how easily so many got through. I wonder if part of the problem is that a fair number of luxury goods aren't sold direct to consumer, but through authorized resellers and I wonder if what the apps really look like is "price comparison" apps -- ie, some way of aggregating prices for luxury products and allowing people to purchase a specific good as if it was going through the actual merchant selling the products.
IE, to users or Apple the apps look like "Priceline" for some luxury good.
The difference between iOS and Android is that Apple charges significantly more per developer account and actually validates the business. A dev getting banned will have to do a lot more than just go from "abc inc" to "xyz inc" to get their stuff back in the Apple Store. $100/year doesn't sound like much, but it does keep the riffraff out for the most part.