It’s not every day that we hear about a company such as Google being scammed or deceived, but that is exactly what happened today. Two scammers managed to deceive the company into hosting 87 fake cryptocurrency apps on the Play Store.
Two scammers managed to scam people out of hundreds of thousands of dollars by hosting fake cryptocurrency apps on the Google Play Store
Now, Play Store, for the most part, is one of the more secure app stores, and Google has several countermeasures in place to ensure that nothing goes wrong. However, the scammers in question have managed to breach through security layers, and now the Mountain View company is taking them to court.
The report indicates that Google has filed a civil lawsuit against these two app developers and is accusing the two of being crypto scammers who deceived the company into hosting fake or fraudulent apps in the app store. One of the scammers is from Shenzhen, China, and the other one is from Hong Kong. And according to the company, they managed to create legit-looking crypto exchanges and investment apps.
These two men then managed to convince the victims through various ads to invest money in these apps, but at the same time, they would not allow the investors to access their money, even if the investors made a profit.
In the lawsuit, Google has claimed that these scammers have affected over 100,000 people across the world, and the victims were conned out of various amounts ranging from $100 to $100,000+. The company also talks about how it managed to find and shut down the apps in question, but it didn’t do much because when one went down, another one of the apps took place.
Google claims that the scammers deceived the company into hosting these 87 apps by faking their identities, locations, and intent. The company also claims that despite spending over $75,000 investigating these scams, it is more concerned about the Play Store’s reputation than the money invested in preventing this from happening.
Honestly, as an Android user, I see a lot of cryptocurrency apps on the Google Play Store all the time, and if I did not know any better, I would be spending money, too. If you are into an investment, always make sure that the app is uploaded by a developer that you know about or a developer that you can run a quick search on to be certain that you are not throwing away your money.