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Report Reveals In-App Purchase Scams In the App Store (macrumors.com)
In a Medium article titled How to Make $80,000 Per Month On the Apple App Store, Johnny Lin uncovers a scamming trend in which apps advertising fake services are making thousands of dollars a month from in-app purchases. The practice works by manipulating search ads to promote dubious apps in the App Store and then preys on unsuspecting users via the in-app purchase mechanism. MacRumors reports: "I scrolled down the list in the Productivity category and saw apps from well-known companies like Dropbox, Evernote, and Microsoft," said Lin. "That was to be expected. But what's this? The #10 Top Grossing Productivity app (as of June 7th, 2017) was an app called 'Mobile protection :Clean & Security VPN.' Given the terrible title of this app (inconsistent capitalization, misplaced colon, and grammatically nonsensical 'Clean & Security VPN?'), I was sure this was a bug in the rankings algorithm. So I check Sensor Tower for an estimate of the app's revenue, which showed ... $80,000 per month?? That couldn't possibly be right. Now I was really curious." To learn how this could be, Lin installed and ran the app, and was soon prompted to start a "free trial" for an "anti-virus scanner" (iOS does not need anti-virus software thanks to Apple's sandboxing rules for individual apps). Tapping on the trial offer then threw up a Touch ID authentication prompt containing the text "You will pay $99.99 for a 7-day subscription starting Jun 9, 2017." Lin was one touch away from paying $400 a month for a non-existent service offered by a scammer. Lin dug deeper and found several other similar apps making money off the same scam, suggesting a wider disturbing trend, with scam apps regularly showing up in the App Store's top grossing lists.
The whole point of the walled-garden, aka App Store, is to prevent exactly this sort of thing. The fact that this sort of thing is able to exist for more than 5 minutes simply shows that Apple is perfectly willing to take its 30% commission and turn a blind eye to scams.
Hyperbolic much?
What happens to you when you encounter a real problem like when you forgot to buy Doritos at the store?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
An appeal to Slashdot eds: this is the second story in a few days in which the headline simply refers to 'the app store', as though there is only one app store in the world. Reading further in both cases indicates that it is the Apple app store that is being referred to. As there are some (many?) of us who don't use and are not interested in Apple products, would it be unreasonable to ask that you identify precisely which app store is being referenced in the story?