Crypto Scams Have Become a Huge Problem in App Stores, Investigation Suggests

Cryptocurrencies have become a huge deal, both within the tech industry as well as outside of it. The meteoric rise of bitcoin’s value over the past few years as well as its acceptance by major companies such as Tesla, along with the rise of other kinds of cryptocurrency, has resulted in a lot of people starting to look into finding ways to invest such things themselves.

With all of that having been said and now out of the way, it is important to note that whenever something valuable starts to become popular in the world, it is inevitable that a number of scams will also start to come about that will attempt to take advantage of people who might not really know any better.

It turns out that both Google and Apple are facing problems because of the fact that this is what is currently going on. Both the Apple App Store as well as the Google Play Store have multiple scam apps/developers that appear as crypto wallets, and whoever tries to use these wallets end up having all of their currency being stolen from them.

The thing that makes these scams even more dangerous is the fact that they keep coming back. Even when Apple or Google take the app down, the creators of these apps simply repackage them and manage to get around the security protocols that have been put into place to prevent them ever going up in the first place. It’s pretty clear that there are a lot of holes that need to be patched up because of the fact that this is the sort of thing that could potentially end up costing lots of users all of their life savings and this is something that they would truly struggle to recover from for obvious reasons.

These apps are being used for a multitude of phishing attacks and they are using the names of legitimate enterprises such as Trezor to go about doing such things, and this is a crisis not just for the companies that are allowing such things to happen but also for crypto as a whole since people are not going to be willing to invest any kind of money into this sort of thing until and unless they get some kind of assurance that their money is never going to end up going anywhere at all.

Apple and Google as well as crypto providers need to take more steps to help keep users safe from such scams, and users should verify the authenticity of any crypto wallet they end up downloading as well to take matters into their own hands.

H/T: CoinDesk / Reddit.

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