Latvian Firm Fined £50,000 for Creating Fake Angry Birds App Scam

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The Android Market, or newly renamed ‘Play Store’, may be catching up on Apple’s App Store with around 500,000 apps inside, but Google has come under fire for not being strict enough when letting apps in.

In the past year Google has removed countless apps that contained harmful malware or are simply fakes of popular apps. We’ve had a fake Angry Birds Space app that looked like the real deal but in fact gained control of your phone, sending text messages to premium rate numbers. We’ve also had countless apps masquerading as the real deal but are quite obviously fake.

A while back there was a scam running on the Google Play Store where fake versions of popular apps such as Angry Birds, Assassin’s Creed and Cut the Rope were mixed in amongst the real deal. With a careful eye you could spot the fake and pick out the actual app, but many were unfortunately tricked into spending pennies on these apps.

In this instance Google has tracked down the people responsible for the fake apps; a Latvian firm who managed to rake in a ridiculous amount of money from running the scam for a short period of time.

Once the customer had installed one of their fake apps, the app would send three text messages, each costing the customer £5 each. These apps cleverly hid the text messages from the user, so they were unable to tell they were being charged on the sly.

The Latvian firm has been fined £50,000 by Google and ordered to pay out £28,000 in refunds to the affected customers. With this sort of thing happening all too often these days, we feel it’s about time Google tightened up its procedure for checking and accepting apps into the Play Store.

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Via: PocketDroid
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