Fraudulent investment apps discovered on the App Store

Attackers try to obtain personal data from iOS device owners and then lure potential victims into financial scam projects.

How the scheme works:

• If the user installs one of the rogue applications and launches it, the program loads a phishing HTML page. There, the victim is offered access to an investment platform supposedly from a large resource mining company. The authors of the fake project claim that participants can earn between 100 and 150 thousand rubles per month.
• Users are offered free access to the platform if they complete a survey. It asks you to answer a question about your financial goals, and at the end you are asked to fill out a special form, indicating your full name, email address, and phone number.
• Once a person has entered personal data, the information reaches the scammers. They then call the user, supposedly to confirm registration, and try to convince him to send a certain amount under the pretext of investing in a dubious project.

“There is a belief that the App Store has extremely strict moderation; some users in the comments were very surprised that there were fraudulent applications in this store. However, this is true. One of the ways to avoid moderation in the stores of applications is that the authors first upload a purely stub application there and then add the functionality they need in an update,” explained Sergey Puzan, cybersecurity expert at Kaspersky Lab.

Kaspersky Lab experts reported the fraudulent apps to Apple and now the apps have been removed from the store.

What to do to avoid falling into the traps of scammers:

• Pay attention to the reviews and ratings of the program: the detected applications had low ratings and users left negative reviews.
• Use a mobile security solution.
• Be critical of generous online offers and check companies’ official websites for programs or promotions.