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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.
"Memory optimizers" have been a thing on Windows for several decades. They all work the same way: they force everything out of memory and into swap. It makes it *look* like you have tons of free memory, but then everything grinds to a halt as it's swapped back in.
https://www.howtogeek.com/1714...
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?
Don't forget Apple's commission on all of those sales, which is yuuuuge. Apple is a willing participant in these scams.
Yeah. Of course Google also makes 30% on all in-app scams on the Playstore. This adds up.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
I started reading/describing this article to an accountant friend of mine, and she immediately said, "I am willing to bet money it is a money laundering scheme"
While I doubt that *all* of these types of apps are a laundering scheme, it makes sense: buy a whole bunch of itunes gift cards, and launder it through the app store. The cut that apple takes? Eh, not that much when you consider the efficiency of other laundering schemes. And as a bonus, you might also get some money on the side from stupid people also installing your app.