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Apple Questioned On App Store Scammers In Antitrust Hearing

By  |  April 25, 2021

Apple was questioned on its inability to rein in subscription scammers on its App Store during’s Senate antitrust hearing, reported TechCrunch. The tech giant has argued that one of the reasons it requires developers to pay App Store commissions is to help Apple fight marketplace fraud and protect consumers. But developers claim Apple is doing very little to stop obvious scams that are now raking in millions and impacting consumer trust in the overall subscription economy, as well as in their own legitimate, subscription-based businesses.

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    One developer in particular, Kosta Eleftheriou, has made it his mission to highlight some of the most egregious scams on the App Store. Functioning as a one-man bunco squad, Eleftheriou regularly tweets out examples of apps that are leveraging fake reviews to promote their harmful businesses.

    Some of the more notable scams he’s uncovered as of late include a crypto wallet app that scammed a user out of his life savings (~US$600,000) in bitcoin; a kids game that actually contained a hidden online casino; and a VPN app scamming users out of US$5 million per year. And, of course, there’s the scam that lit the fire in the first place: A competitor to Eleftheriou’s own Apple Watch app that he alleges scammed users out of US$2 million per year, after stealing his marketing materials, cloning his app, and buying fake reviews to make the scammer’s look like the better choice.

    In a line of questioning from Georgia’s Senator Jon Ossoff, Apple’s Chief Compliance Officer Kyle Andeer was asked why Apple was not able to locate scams, given that these fraudulent apps are, as Ossoff put it, “trivially easy to identify as scams.”

    He asked why do we have rely upon “open-source reporting and journalists” to find the app scams — a reference that likely, at least in part, referred to Eleftheriou’s recent activities.

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