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Fake app approved by Apple’s App Store stole man’s life savings in bitcoin
Tuesday, March 30, 2021 4:51 pm

Apple bills its App Store as “a place you can trust,” touting that “for over a decade, the App Store has proved to be a safe and trusted place to discover and download apps” where every submission is scanned and reviewed, ensuring each is safe, secure, useful and unique. One man trusted Apple’s marketing so much that it led to him losing nearly all of his life savings in an instant.

Reed Albergotti reports for The Washington Post:

Phillipe Christodoulou wanted to check his bitcoin balance last month, so he searched the App Store on his iPhone for “Trezor,” the maker of a small hardware device he uses to store his cryptocurrency. Up popped the company’s padlock logo set against a bright green background. The app was rated close to five stars. He downloaded it and typed in his credentials.

In less than a second, nearly all of his life savings — 17.1 bitcoin worth $600,000 at the time — was gone. The app was a fake, designed to trick people into thinking it was a legitimate app.

But Christodoulou is angrier at Apple than at the thieves themselves: He says Apple marketed the App Store as a safe and trusted place, where each app is reviewed before it is allowed in the store. Christodoulou, once a loyal Apple customer, said he no longer admires the company. “They betrayed the trust that I had in them,” he said in an interview. “Apple doesn’t deserve to get away with this.”

“Apple frequently pushes myths about user privacy and security as a shield against its anti-competitive App Store practices,” said Meghan DiMuzio, executive director of the Coalition for App Fairness, which was formed to fight Apple’s power over its App Store. “The truth is, Apple’s security ‘standards’ are inconsistently applied across apps and only enforced when it benefits Apple.”

…In fact, it’s easy for scammers to circumvent Apple’s rules, according to experts. Criminal app developers can break Apple’s rules by submitting seemingly innocuous apps for approval and then transforming them into phishing apps that trick people into giving up their information, according to Apple. When Apple finds out, it removes the apps and bans the developers, the company says. But it’s too late for the people who fell for the scam. Crypto scams are also common on Google’s Android and on the Web.

MacDailyNews Take: Their shoddy legislation attempts aren’t getting passed (or even getting a vote), so those who want a free ride in Apple’s App Store are using scattered examples of criminals who defrauded Apple in order to scam users as a cudgel via an amenable and/or ignorant media.

And, yet, these freeloader wannabes fail to explain how destroying Apple’s App Store by forcing Apple to carry for-profit apps for free, despite the cost to Apple, would protect users from scammers. Because destroying Apple’s App Store wouldn’t stop scammers, as the article above admits they’re already common in Google’s Android store and on the Web.

The bottom line: Epic Games et al. want to enjoy all of the benefits of Apple’s App Store, including access to well over one billion of the world’s most affluent users for free and they’ll dupe any brainless politician or reporter to further their doomed quest.

Now, we’ll leave it to the lawyers regarding whether Christodoulou might have a viable case against Apple for false advertising while hoping that the FBI, with which Christodoulou has reportedly filed a report, can catch the scammers and recoup the stolen bitcoin.

https://macdailynews.com/2021/03/30/fake-app-approved-by-apples-app-store-stole-mans-life-savings-in-bitcoin/