Fraudster, Hackers and Scammers
Over the years, the booming popularity of the crypto-market had attracted the attention of common people, developers, entrepreneurs, investors, and traders.
Unfortunately, it also attracted the attention of less desirable type of people: Fraudsters, hackers, and scammers.
The first types of people are without a doubt good for the booming cryptocurrency ecosystem, the remaining types, not so much.
Like the first five types, fraudsters, hackers, and scammers were also looking for the opportunity to get rich off of cryptocurrency. But unlike the first type, they’re not doing it through lawful means.
Instead of earning their cryptocurrencies through trading, these people would try to get theirs from other people through, phishing, scamming, hacking, and the likes.
Phishing was one of the most common method cryptocurrency thieves liked to employ. For the informed, this method is rather easy to spot but for the uninitiated it could cause problems.
Fraudsters and scammers that employ phishing would often visit legit platforms with lots of traffic, and would leave links that would lead to dangerous websites that could potentially steal your private information like your bank account number, credit card number, private passwords, etc.
I personally encountered lots of these phishing attempts, and the best way to avoid being a victim of phishing is to ignore the links that these fraudsters and scammers left behind.
Hacking is one of the dangers of using the internet. As long as you use the internet, you’re always at risk of being hacked. Even the blockchain, once hailed as unhackable are now getting hacked.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, these cryptocurrency hackers usually target exchanges, whales, and digital wallets that hold a lot of cryptos. But that doesn’t mean that you’re safe just because you’re poor or don’t own a lot of cryptos. If you’re cryptocurrency was on the platform that was hacked then you’re out of luck.
Scams are also very common in the crypto-space, and lot of unfortunate people have fallen victim to these soul less scammers. Actually, a recent study suggests majority of cryptocurrencies lost in the past years was because of scams.
Scammers used various methods to steal your hard earned cryptos but one of the most popular was investment scams.
Investment scams, as the name suggest, were fake investments which sole purpose was to tempt victims to invest in whatever the scammer was offering. The most common template of fake investments was the HYIP or high-yield investment programs.
HYIP is a type of Ponzi scheme that promises big returns for your investments. The bigger the investments the bigger the return… Or so they claimed. In reality, HYIP is unsustainable and would eventually run away with your money after paying you a few times using the money that new investors invested.
In the crypto-market, scams are not just limited to HYIP. Scams also take on the form Fake ICOs and fraudulent exchanges. These types of scams are not that easy to detect and could actually operate legally for a few years before suddenly closing and running away with your money and cryptos.
Remember Bitconnect?
I won’t go into details since there are plenty of articles about it online.
App Store, Play Store, and Fake Apps
Okay, that was a long “introduction.”
This article was actually supposed to be about fake apps that can be downloaded on the App store and Play Store.
If you’re a frequent visitor of the Apple App store, and the Google Play Store, then you must have seen a lot of apps, or in our case dapps related to cryptocurrencies. These dapps ranges from crypto-based faucets to cryptocurrency wallets.
The sheer numbers of these dapps are staggering and showcase the popularity of the blockchain technology. Unfortunately, majority of these applications were fakes whose sole purpose was to steal your private information and cryptocurrencies.
Both Apple and Google have been trying to get rid of such applications in there stores but the sheer numbers of fake apps being developed and released makes verifying the authenticity of each applications very difficult.
Don’t be mistaken though, I’m not trying to defend Apple and Google. Although not complicit they’re also responsible for the propagation of these fake apps.
There were many cases where Apple and Google simply ignored users when they complain about certain apps. I myself have sent reports on several fake apps I’ve encountered on the Play Store to Google but for some reason a few of them still remained.
Maybe the complaint was simply loss in the waves of other complaints but it’s because of this reason that many fake apps get away with their schemes, often at the expense of the users.
There’s one such scenario that happened some time ago.
An IOS user that goes by the name of Phillippe Christodoulou lost about 17.1 BTC when he downloaded a fake Trezor app at the App store.
Back then, the lost BTC was worth approximately $600,000 but today coins lost was estimated to be worth well over a million dollars.
A million dollar is definitely not a small amount but it was lost just like that.
Certainly, the blame lies largely on the hacker who developed the fake Trezor app and on Phillippe Christodoulou who didn’t do his due diligence when downloading said app.
But that doesn’t mean that Apple was free of blame.
The fact of the matter was, Apple failed to screen and verify the authenticity of the fake Trezor app.
“Study after study has shown that the App Store is the most secure app marketplace in the world.” - Fred Sainz, spokesperson of Apple.
Apple touted that applications downloaded from the App store are always safe but what happened to Phillippe Christodoulou proved that it was anything but.
“Apple frequently pushes myths about user privacy and security as a shield against its anti-competitive App Store practices.” - Meghan DiMuzio, executive director of the Coalition for App Fairness.
I completely agree.
When it comes to Apple and Google, user privacy and security is just a myth.
After all, these two companies use the data collected from their users to sell them their products and services. It’s nothing new, really.
But, hey, at least Apple is protecting its users against Facebook’s intrusive apps, right? Well, yes but that just Apple applying security standards because it benefits them.
“The truth is, Apple’s security ‘standards’ are inconsistently applied across apps and only enforced when it benefits Apple.” - Meghan DiMuzio, executive director of the Coalition for App Fairness.
This obviously doesn’t just apply to Apple but to companies like Google as well. In many cases, these companies would only apply their standards if their company could benefit from it or if there’s media attention.
Now, the question is: Will a case similar to that of Phillippe Christodoulou, happen again?
In all likelihood, it’s a yes.
Maybe not as big as that of Phillippe Christodoulou but there’s a good chance similar thing will happen again. Unless of course, Apple and Google grew a conscience and decided to take the matter more seriously, and channel more funds and people to make sure that it won’t happen again.
Nope… Not gonna happen.
What do you guys think? Will Apple and Google take more measure to prevent or at least lessen the chance of such a large scale hack from happening again? Please write your thoughts in the comment section.
Thank you for reading.
Online Article Mentioned in the Post:
Image Source:
https://pixabay.com/photos/scam-hacker-security-virus-fraud-4126798/
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