The Play Store, the app store for Android smartphones, offers thousands of apps in many categories from health to e-commerce, banking to education. These are a great addition to our lives. Of course, hackers are not idle in the meantime. Hundreds of malicious apps are discovered and removed from the Play Store every year. These applications, which manage to overcome Google’s control wall, can also cause damage. Finally, for this very reason, Google sued two Chinese app developers.
Google sues app developers for scamming people
The developers, Yunfeng Sun (alias Alphonse Sun) and Hongnam Cheung (alias Zhang Hongnim and Stanford Fischer), are accused of committing fraud by developing fake cryptocurrency trading and exchange apps.
Between 2014 and 2019, the duo developed 87 fake apps that reached at least 100,000 people around the world. The developers reportedly tried to attract attention by making false promises of high returns to users.
According to the information provided, they created an environment of trust by allowing users to invest and withdraw small amounts of money from the apps. In this way, users felt safe and were encouraged to deposit more money.
Unfortunately, as the amounts deposited increased, cases of fraud started to occur. And the money that users deposited didn’t really have any impact on the market. It was just a changing number in the background of the system.
Scammers are said to have attracted thousands of people by promoting them on social media. They even worked with professional screen faces for this.
According to the details of the lawsuit, the victims reportedly suffered losses of several thousand to 75 thousand dollars, although no exact amount for damages was specified. Google, on the other hand, says it has more than 75 thousand dollars in damages. We will see how the case will turn out.
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