16 ms·

$80k/month App Store Scam

716 points by amima 9y ago

meric 9y ago
Looks like many of the keywords you can buy Ads for are underpriced. To advertise for a keyword you need to build can "relevant" to that keyword. It takes time for legitimate app developers to build apps to take advantage of those keywords. Until then, the underpricing of ads is taken advantage of by these "scammers" who build costly non-functional apps and recycle the earnings into buying ads for them.
- Dylan16807 9y ago
  That won't fix anything. When a scammer is successfully charging 50 times as much as a legitimate app, they can outbid any real ad.
tinus_hn 9y ago
I don't understand why such an obvious scam works; Apple keeps the money for a while so they should be able to cancel the developer account and refund all users.
- sumedh 9y ago
  Someone needs to report the scam and then wait for Apple to do their review. If nobody reports it, the scammer makes a lot of money till that time.
  - tyingq 9y ago
    There does seem to be some opportunity to inject common sense in there though. How common, for example, is a $100/week in-app purchase? Seems like there's some threshold that should kick off a review automatically.
    - paultopia 9y ago
      Yes, that. This is not a difficult problem. App purchase behavior that is more than a couple of standard deviations away from ordinary, but successful, apps should trigger a heavy human review.
  - mathiasben 9y ago
    Are we to assume that NOBODY has reported this in the two months it's been in the app store?
- valuearb 9y ago
  There is a 35-60 day lag time in getting paid. If you started scamming May 1st, you wont' be getting paid until the first week in July for your May scam sales, so there is the potential in freezing the account. I found a scam competitor once and reported it to Apple and they pulled it just before the payment day so I'm hoping he never got paid.
- maaaats 9y ago
  Apple earns 30% per scammed user and let the app pass through review. The implication is obvious.
  - vacri 9y ago
    The whole point of the App store and Apple's bragging about it was that you were in a walled garden, and shit like this didn't happen. It's in their own interest not to kill their golden goose by allowing this kind of scam in their garden.
  - quesera 9y ago
    ...the implication is asinine.
chatmasta 9y ago
These App Store ads are the Wild West right now. I've seen multiple cases where I search an exact app name, and that app's competitor has the top "spot" due to buying an ad. It's like if you searched for Uber and saw an ad for Lyft above it. How long will apple allow this? At the very least it should be impossible to bid on trademarked terms, and no ad should ever outrank an exact match result.
- reboog711 9y ago
  Ignoring any ethical concerns you may have... Advertising has often been comparing yourself to other brands. As one real world example: The Pepsi Challenge from the 80s. People drank Coke and Pepsi blindly and chose which one they liked better. It is not illegal in the US and not inherently a misuse of trademark law. I'd be surprised if you were to tell me that Uber and Lyft are not buying ads against each other's search terms.
  - chatmasta 9y ago
    Google does not allow bidding on trademark terms you do not own, so there is at least clear precedent. Edit: Oops, mostly wrong. Guess I've had an adblocker for too long. :)
    - jasongill 9y ago
      Yes they do, and they have for 15+ years. Their website even says: Trademarks as keywords Google won't investigate or restrict the selection of trademarks as keywords, even if we receive a trademark complaint. Search for "Uber" on Google and you should see a Lyft ad right near the top of the paid section.
      - tyingq 9y ago
        Worth noting they will police the use of the trademarked term in the ad itself. But only after the trademark owner complains about it, and not in all situations. You can still bid on the term, of course, just somewhat restricted in what the resulting ad can say.
tyingq 9y ago
I was under the impression that the approval process for the app store was somewhat rigorous. How did this app get through that?
- Profragile 9y ago
  The approval process is to weed out competition.
- valuearb 9y ago
  Apple is rigorous (I've been rejected close to 20 times). But app review is also hard, especially when there is a flood of new app submissions every week, day and hour. Validating that an app does what it says it does isn't really what App Review is for. Most of my rejections were for how I described a feature, not how a feature worked. Also there are ways to defeat App Review. Geo-fencing, time-boxing, etc so your illegal code never runs during review.
  - notadoc 9y ago
    Shouldn't it be a giant red flag to a reviewer when the app is focused on an entirely fictional premise? If the app was claiming to grow a dinosaur in your backyard after you pay $400/mo would it be treated any different?
    - tyingq 9y ago
      Agreed. Also, all the obvious typos, unneeded permissions, and the high in app purchase price seem like they should have been flags to dig deeper. Unless they somehow hid all of this, it seems to point to a weakness in the app review process.
    - valuearb 9y ago
      Yes it should be. But it might not be that easy. App reviewers aren't developers, sometimes they don't know what's possible or not. And they review lots of apps, sometimes they might not apply the rules correctly. But the bigger problem is that you can write conditional code that doesn't run during review. So the skanky things you do might not be caught, see Uber's geofencing of cupertino when they tried to fingerprint phones to catch account scammers. Pretty sure the marketing text can't be changed post-review, so again that should have at least been caught.
kennydude 9y ago
Some keywords need to return help topics instead. If you search "virus scanner", Apple should tell users their device really doesn't need one
- tyingq 9y ago
  In hindsight, this seems obvious, and a great idea. Are there any "banned search keywords" now, or is it completely unrestricted? I'm curious if there's just no mechanism for this at all, or if they just aren't using it when they should.
  - kennydude 9y ago
    I don't think there is, or I haven't come across any
- thirdsun 9y ago
  I like the idea. A friendly banner that says "Did you know that your iPhone really doesn't need Antivirus apps? Learn more..." is a nice way to educate the user. Nevertheless garbage apps like the one described here have no place in the App Store and should not be available at all.
- dandare 9y ago
  One could argue to the contrary; The existence (and apparent success) of scam apps like this is a clear evidence your iPhone could use a 3rd party "virus scanner" - one that would protect you from malicious "virus scanners" :p
  - kennydude 9y ago
    Can they even work? It depends if iOS provides a public API for getting a list of installed apps
    - wingerlang 9y ago
      No. The only way would be to check "openURL" for known ones, but that's limited. Or from some webserver update a list of known scam ones and just tell them to uninstall them.
notadoc 9y ago
How does garbage like this get through the App Store? I thought Apple was notoriously strict on approvals? Also, do people still use the App Store? I don't think I have casually browsed for apps in 5 years or more.
- alaskamiller 9y ago
  But I’ve also never clicked on a Google Ad, yet Google somehow rode Adwords to $700 billion dollars today.
- sausman 9y ago
  I was wondering the same thing.. Maybe the developer was able to remotely flip a switch after the app went through approval to change its behavior and app review didn't catch it? What's really surprising is how long it's been out (almost 2 months)
  - quaz3l 9y ago
    I can see that by using Microsoft CodePush or similar. But you can't change the description, in app purchases or title without going through the approval process again.
    - vsl 9y ago
      You definitely can the description...
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- Buge 9y ago
  Maybe they submitted it 100 times before it got approved. With the money at stake, the effort is worth it.
  - sumoboy 9y ago
    There should be a bad app bounty for stuff like this trash.
akcreek 9y ago
How are chargebacks handled on the App store? I would assume a scam like this will receive a relatively enormous number of chargebacks.
- LoSboccacc 9y ago
  they will threaten to close your account if you chargeback too much.
  - jtbayly 9y ago
    I tried to get a refund from Apple once, for a fraudulent app, but I never heard back. So I disputed the charge with Visa. I thought I'd solved the problem until Apple locked me out of the app store. The only way to get back to installing apps (even free ones) on my phone, if I remember right, was to use a new credit card. Later on I did successfully get a refund for being charged twice for the same content when I bought it again on a family-shared device. Free tip: in-app purchases apparently aren't sharable to the family.
    - hellbanner 9y ago
      Counter anecodote: I got a (Mac, not iOS) app refunded within 2 days because it didn't function as well as I thought it would (email client). No hassle.
  - prodmerc 9y ago
    Amazing.
- bartread 9y ago
  I was thinking a similar thing. How many people wouldn't notice being $400/month down? Also, don't Apple email people receipts for subscription payments as for one off purchases? I mean, I'm sure there will be a few who don't notice, but it seems likely that chargebacks would be through the roof.
- Merad 9y ago
  I'm willing to bet that this is some kind of money laundering operation, a way to pull funds from stolen credit cards, or perhaps a way for "tech support" type scammers to get payment from their victims. Perhaps all of they above. I know some extremely technology illiterate people, but I can't think of any of them who would willingly pay $400 a month for "virus protection."
_pmf_ 9y ago
One thing of note: the spelling errors are deliberate to let only the most gullible people through to the last step (improving the odds that the person in question will not know how to report this as a scam or initiate a chargeback). The same tactics are used by ads on porn sites[0]. [0] Or so I have heard ... from a friend
- slig 9y ago
  There's a paper from Microsoft IIRC explaining this behavior. I'm on mobile right now, otherwise I'd find it and link it here.
  - fgandiya 9y ago
    This one https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/why-do-nigerian-scammers-say-they-are-from-nigeria/?from=http%3A%2F%2Fresearch.microsoft.com%2Fpubs%2F167719%2Fwhyfromnigeria.pdf https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/why-do-...
- prodmerc 9y ago
  Similar thing with long sales pages. Reader doesn't know exactly what he wants, isn't convinced, but with a lot of filler mumbo jumbo and some images, maybe a video, you can get them to buy on the spot.
- pthreads 9y ago
  Interesting! I was wondering what the reason was. My first instinct was to assume the developer just used Google Translate or something like that and perhaps not being an English speaker was bad at spelling too. But based on your comment I am not intrigued with the possibility of it being a deliberate tactic.
blhack 9y ago
This is particularly annoying while my beta is "waiting for review" so I can have the privilege of giving it to a few beta testers. How does apple not expect that annoying developers with their app store process (so much so that things like this exist: https://fastlane.tools/ https://fastlane.tools/), AND charging them 30% AND apparently not actually reviewing anything about the apps making it into their store isn't going to eventually drive people away from it? (Why yes, I am cranky over the amount of hoops I had to jump through to get to the point of asking apple for permission to put my beta on my co-founder's iPhone)
- Entangled 9y ago
  I've always said that's stupidly annoying stopping me from installing apps on my own phone or on my relatives and friends as long as I do it manually using an USB cable. Also stopping beta apps from running after a week. My macOS apps run forever and I develop dozens of apps for personal use.
  - robbiep 9y ago
    It's 60 days now?
- joeld42 9y ago
  You can use HockeyApp (https://hockeyapp.net/ https://hockeyapp.net/) or just get your friend's UDID and build an IPA yourself to distribute the build to your friend's device, even if he or she is remote. Testflight is more intended for "semi-open" betas where you only have tester's email.
  - blhack 9y ago
    Thank you!
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  - st3fan 9y ago
LoSboccacc 9y ago
yeah app store quality has dropped to google play levels to the point that one of ios last, actual, concrete advantage for non technical users is becoming moot.
- microcolonel 9y ago
  The Mac App Store seems to have been considerably worse than the Google Play store since inception. I think that the iOS app store is just coming down to the level of the Mac App Store: barely suitable for distributing Apple's own applications.
  - derefr 9y ago
    They've built an entirely-new store that's shipping with iOS 11, apparently. Might fix a few things.
microcolonel 9y ago
You know, it's sad that people are eager to pay Apple nearly a thousand dollars for a phone, buy an iCloud subscription to go with it, and maybe buy a MacBook (Pro?); and then content that after all of that money changes hands, Apple still wants to fill 80% of your screen with an advertisement. Then, if it wasn't bad enough, they don't vet the advertised applications for basic legitimacy (meanwhile legitimate apps frequently get caught up in endless nitpicking at submission). I get why people do it, but it's sad that they do.
- wayn3 9y ago
  im really happy with my macbook. its reasonably powerful, doesnt make any noise, has an SSD and is a unix system without any of the linux haggling. paying 1k extra for not having to deal with shit was really worth it for me. certainly made sense from a quality of life perspective. and im anything but an apple fanboy.
ronalbarbaren 9y ago
Base developer's name, seem they are from Vietnam. No surprise.
hellofunk 9y ago
When I read stuff like this I really lose faith in the human race.
- chinathrow 9y ago
  That's my current feeling looking at the Bitcoin price chart.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
htormey 9y ago
wow, I'm pretty pissed off by this. One of my clients is a medical marijuana startup and we have had to jump through so many hoops to stay compliant with Apple's random app store rules. We have been rejected on several occasions and pulled from the app store. I also had another app that was accepted into the app store then when I pushed an update release I was informed that my logo had to change because it used Apple's camera emoji. I only did this because another popular app did the same thing (down for lunch). In order to stay compliant, I had to change my logo. I'm fine with said rules existing as in theory they are meant to protect lay customers from junk like this. How on earth did this thing make it through a review process that's so hard on some apps? I wish Apple would apply it's rules and vetting with more consistency.
kuroguro 9y ago
Brilliant! Wish I would have thought of that xD
kuon 9y ago
This kind of things make me wonder why I am honest and poor (I mean not rich to the millions, I am not actually "poor"). I could do scams like this and be rich by the minute...
- morganvachon 9y ago
  You said it yourself: You're honest. Take pride in that and keep being you. I have just enough knowledge and just enough free time to maybe pull off one of these kinds of scams, but two things stop me: One, I have to look at myself in the mirror every day, and two, even if I set my morals aside, given my luck, I'd be the one Apple finally decides to make an example out of and sends the feds to my doorstep.
  - smnscu 9y ago
    > given my luck, I'd be the one Apple finally decides to make an example out of and sends the feds to my doorstep This usually has more to do with honest people not being good/experienced at being criminals, rather than luck.
- rcarrigan87 9y ago
  Scamming ends up being just as much work and hustle as doing it the right/honest way...
- pcunite 9y ago
  Honestly can very much mean making less. The rich are not often associated with "giving" but rather "taking".
  - codedokode 9y ago
    Too much honesty can hurt your business if you are doing sales or negotiations.
prodmerc 9y ago
> I’ve also never clicked on a Google Ad. I've never done it, either. I clearly remember the only few times I clicked on AdSense ads - once by mistake, and was extremely annoyed at the results (it was a sort of list like search results), and 2-3 times to test my own AdSense ads (yeah, against ToS). Yet AdSense is raking in billions. I've always wondered who actually clicks on the ads :D
- floatboth 9y ago
  Bots click ads. And people paid to click ads :D
- giarc 9y ago
  If you are on HackerNews, you probably aren't the typical internet user. I bet my 60 year old mom clicks on tons of ads without even knowing it.
- ashark 9y ago
  > Yet AdSense is raking in billions. I've always wondered who actually clicks on the ads :D A lot of users have a really poor sense of what all the stuff on their screen is. Google started putting ads inline with search results for a reason. Well, reasons, rather, all of them fairly "evil", but that was one of them.
- roywiggins 9y ago
  The scummy DOWNLOAD NOW ads that end up on legit software download pages has got to snag more than a handful of people. They're big shiny buttons with tiny (actually an ad) disclaimers.
endgame 9y ago
At what point do you say "no, the app store experiment has failed" and give users control of their own devices? Never, I guess.
- chipperyman573 9y ago
  Once Apple stops making money. At 30% for every transaction, this won't happen any time soon.
- amelius 9y ago
  We need an extension of net neutrality (app neutrality?)
timwaagh 9y ago
finally i can be rich too! too bad i am not an ios dev. these apps are made by people from 'nam. i doubt you could do this in a civilized country without getting sued into the ground though.
ge96 9y ago
Haha I thought this was a how to guide initially as a "good entrepreneur" mind you good to me is subjective, or is it personal. Money is money right? I can't ask my clients to pay me so I obvs don't support that. Nice into the rabbit hole though, should see how bad it gets with VMs.
- mark_edward 9y ago
  Are you saying you're a scammer? I'm having a hard time understanding this comment
  - ge96 9y ago
    No I'm not a scammer. I can't even ask my clients to pay me. Most recently these people got a big SEO audit pdf and I'm the poor bastard that has to do it for no pay hahaha. They're like "alright so... all these urls and how the db/pages work? Rewrite them..." and I'm pretty sure I'd break a good part of it, just because of how expansive the site is. (I'll decline at least on this part as it's beyond me, like being asked to integrate a PayPal recurring API payment thing) Nah they're like my second best client ever but it's still I don't get paid hourly/"a reasonable fixed price" so no in short form, I have no self respect. I was scammed once (at least), it was a site that said "Sell your ideas for money!" hahaha, I "sold my ideas" For a non-refundable fee of $99 and this also overdrew my bank account. ^^ That reinforces my original thought, I could build a similar "legit looking site" throw a payment system on there and get some poor schmuck like myself to fall for it and pay. Good job on me who built that site for say $17.00 and some time. edit: I was scammed by this lady (beat up looking face) and this guy, her "son" or whatever... they were asking for gas but insisted I give it to them in cash (at the gas station). Yeah I'm pretty stupid.
    - mark_edward 9y ago
      I see, i commiserate. I got stiffed for a months work by a recent freelance client, i empathize. I'm sorry if I slighted you, guess I read the wrong thing out of your comment. I hope you don't get scammed in the future.
blunte 9y ago
#1 - Apple has a quarter of a trillion dollars in cash. You would think they could afford intelligent, reasonable app review teams. Clearly they don't bother, based on the complaints from honest developers and evidence of pure scams like this. #2 - Average computer/phone users are willfully ignorant. I would say stupid, but that's a judgement call (even though I think it's true). Someone with knowledge can advise them, but they cannot be bothered with all that fuss. They'd rather ignore sound advice and push buttons. After all, look at the who runs the country and the complacence of many of its people. Have you ever had a friend who was a lawyer? Did you ever get some traffic ticket and think, "Hey, I'll ask Bob if he can help me handle this!"? I'm guilty of this once in a while. But "average users" are guilty of doing this to technical people all the fucking time. And when we advise them of behaviors to change to avoid future incidents, they nod and agree, but then repeat the stupid behavior later. Sorry for the rant, but perhaps it's time to just start replying to scammed/screwed users with, "Oh wow, that's really unfortunate. I guess you'll have to go buy a new phone/computer." Maybe that will jar them into actually using their brains. * Edit for wine-related typos.
- CM30 9y ago
  Well, they're a tiny bit better than Google when it comes to app reviewing. I mean, Google Play is literally filled to the rafters with low quality ripoffs of known franchises that clearly break every copyright and trademark law in the book, along with the kind of scams mentioned in the article. But in either case, it seems like the 'submission review process' is far more minimal than whatever Apple and Google advertise on their websites. Seems like unless a lawyer/the police/authorities send a take down notice, the companies don't give a toss about anything resembling quality control.
  - blunte 9y ago
    There is some responsibility as gatekeeper of applications (especially if you make an effort to create a walled garden) to ensure some level of quality. And as this article points out, Apple obviously made little or no effort (or is very stupid? I doubt that.) Consider the potential number of new apps per day to an app store. Now imagine that each app requires 10-60 minutes of a halfway intelligent human's time to review. That's not such a huge staff required, especially compared to the revenue of said app store. Or let's be generous and reduce the responsibility of app stores to just police the top 20 or 50 apps. If, daily or weekly, the top 20 apps were reviewed for quality, that would obviously require a very small staff... and it would prevent situations like this. Ultimately, situations like this will result in class action lawsuits (like the one Amazon dealt with that resulted in them refunding a lot of childrens' in-app purchases). Perhaps what's happening is that companies decide it's just easier (organizationally) to handle legal problems than to manage business better. After all, final settlements tend to be fractions of actual costs to consumers.
fright 9y ago
While it's frustrating if taken at face value, Sensor Tower's numbers aren't totally valid. They get the number for a few of my apps really wrong. The download stats are more or less true, but the revenue can be way off.
balladeer 9y ago
And I thought Apple vets the apps (and from what I heard even betas and upgrades/updates too?) before letting it go live on the App Store. As a long time Android user (and no I wans't happy for most parts; and I wanted to taste the iOS waters both as an user and a mobile dev) who recently moved to an iPhone SE I feel really disappointed.
whyagaindavid 9y ago
Does nobody from apple read hn? How does one recommend iPhone to NGOs, privacy activists, other vulnerable people?
downandout 9y ago
There has got to be more to this story. People would refute accidental purchases of $400/mo. Perhaps these guys are using tech support scams etc to drive traffic to this thing, or they're simply using stolen credit card numbers to setup Apple App Store accounts. Perhaps that's why the spelling and layout is so bad...it's possible that they don't intend anybody outside of themselves to actually use it.
- ceejayoz 9y ago
  > There has got to be more to this story. People would refute accidental purchases of $400/mo. There are plenty of folks out there who pay little to no attention to what's being billed on their cards. As an example: http://www.nbcnews.com/id/14838642/ns/technology_and_science-tech_and_gadgets/t/spent-rented-rotary-phone/ http://www.nbcnews.com/id/14838642/ns/technology_and_science...
  - gagege 9y ago
    Poor lady. It sounds like she may have been fully aware of what she was paying, she just never did any research to find out that she was overpaying by about 500x. Which, is almost as bad as never looking at your bank statements.
- zrth 9y ago
  You could even force people on the street to subscribe to the app instead of mugging them. This solved the problem that more and more people are cashless. Also you don't have to worry about selling contraband.
- codedokode 9y ago
  I agree, that looks suspicious. Why people would need adware removal on iPhone when there is no malware in the first place? And judging by app design it doesn't look like its developer cares about conversion.
- rco8786 9y ago
  > it's possible that they don't intend anybody outside of themselves to actually use it. Then why run the ads?
lordvon 9y ago
I get the feeling that companies like Amazon and Apple purposefully try to hide as much as possible/tolerable the fact that you are subscribed to something (specifically, Apple apps and Amazon's Audible). I've spent tens if not hundreds of dollars towards subscriptions I didn't even know I had, and I'm afraid this might account for a shocking amount of revenue, as this article suggests. Microsoft on the other hand seems to let you know when you are going to charged again (I've experienced this with my office license subscription).
draw_down 9y ago
There's no way that a huge portion of the blame for this is not Apple's. Some of the ways they run the App Store were pretty silly starting out, and now just outright ridiculous. Little distinction between ads and search results? No filtering or approval for ads? Scammy $100/week subscriptions for nothing? Meanwhile you're not allowed to make fun of the presidents elbows or whatever. Come on.
jitbit 9y ago
Yeah. And Apple just rejected my app because it has a 'register free trial' link. Which is actually free, actually a trial, no CC info asked, no in-app purchase. Their response was "if you offering something - you should be using in-app purchases". Oh. OK.

716 points by amima 9y ago

Looks like many of the keywords you can buy Ads for are underpriced. To advertise for a keyword you need to build can "relevant" to that keyword. It takes time for legitimate app developers to build apps to take advantage of those keywords. Until then, the underpricing of ads is taken advantage of by these "scammers" who build costly non-functional apps and recycle the earnings into buying ads for them.

Dylan16807 9y ago
That won't fix anything. When a scammer is successfully charging 50 times as much as a legitimate app, they can outbid any real ad.

tinus_hn 9y ago

I don't understand why such an obvious scam works; Apple keeps the money for a while so they should be able to cancel the developer account and refund all users.

sumedh 9y ago
Someone needs to report the scam and then wait for Apple to do their review. If nobody reports it, the scammer makes a lot of money till that time.
- tyingq 9y ago
  There does seem to be some opportunity to inject common sense in there though. How common, for example, is a $100/week in-app purchase? Seems like there's some threshold that should kick off a review automatically.
  - paultopia 9y ago
    Yes, that. This is not a difficult problem. App purchase behavior that is more than a couple of standard deviations away from ordinary, but successful, apps should trigger a heavy human review.
- mathiasben 9y ago
  Are we to assume that NOBODY has reported this in the two months it's been in the app store?
valuearb 9y ago
There is a 35-60 day lag time in getting paid. If you started scamming May 1st, you wont' be getting paid until the first week in July for your May scam sales, so there is the potential in freezing the account. I found a scam competitor once and reported it to Apple and they pulled it just before the payment day so I'm hoping he never got paid.
maaaats 9y ago
Apple earns 30% per scammed user and let the app pass through review. The implication is obvious.
- vacri 9y ago
  The whole point of the App store and Apple's bragging about it was that you were in a walled garden, and shit like this didn't happen. It's in their own interest not to kill their golden goose by allowing this kind of scam in their garden.
- quesera 9y ago
  ...the implication is asinine.

chatmasta 9y ago

These App Store ads are the Wild West right now. I've seen multiple cases where I search an exact app name, and that app's competitor has the top "spot" due to buying an ad. It's like if you searched for Uber and saw an ad for Lyft above it. How long will apple allow this? At the very least it should be impossible to bid on trademarked terms, and no ad should ever outrank an exact match result.

reboog711 9y ago
Ignoring any ethical concerns you may have... Advertising has often been comparing yourself to other brands. As one real world example: The Pepsi Challenge from the 80s. People drank Coke and Pepsi blindly and chose which one they liked better. It is not illegal in the US and not inherently a misuse of trademark law. I'd be surprised if you were to tell me that Uber and Lyft are not buying ads against each other's search terms.
- chatmasta 9y ago
  Google does not allow bidding on trademark terms you do not own, so there is at least clear precedent. Edit: Oops, mostly wrong. Guess I've had an adblocker for too long. :)
  - jasongill 9y ago
    Yes they do, and they have for 15+ years. Their website even says: Trademarks as keywords Google won't investigate or restrict the selection of trademarks as keywords, even if we receive a trademark complaint. Search for "Uber" on Google and you should see a Lyft ad right near the top of the paid section.
    - tyingq 9y ago
      Worth noting they will police the use of the trademarked term in the ad itself. But only after the trademark owner complains about it, and not in all situations. You can still bid on the term, of course, just somewhat restricted in what the resulting ad can say.

tyingq 9y ago

I was under the impression that the approval process for the app store was somewhat rigorous. How did this app get through that?

Profragile 9y ago
The approval process is to weed out competition.
valuearb 9y ago
Apple is rigorous (I've been rejected close to 20 times). But app review is also hard, especially when there is a flood of new app submissions every week, day and hour. Validating that an app does what it says it does isn't really what App Review is for. Most of my rejections were for how I described a feature, not how a feature worked. Also there are ways to defeat App Review. Geo-fencing, time-boxing, etc so your illegal code never runs during review.
- notadoc 9y ago
  Shouldn't it be a giant red flag to a reviewer when the app is focused on an entirely fictional premise? If the app was claiming to grow a dinosaur in your backyard after you pay $400/mo would it be treated any different?
  - tyingq 9y ago
    Agreed. Also, all the obvious typos, unneeded permissions, and the high in app purchase price seem like they should have been flags to dig deeper. Unless they somehow hid all of this, it seems to point to a weakness in the app review process.
  - valuearb 9y ago
    Yes it should be. But it might not be that easy. App reviewers aren't developers, sometimes they don't know what's possible or not. And they review lots of apps, sometimes they might not apply the rules correctly. But the bigger problem is that you can write conditional code that doesn't run during review. So the skanky things you do might not be caught, see Uber's geofencing of cupertino when they tried to fingerprint phones to catch account scammers. Pretty sure the marketing text can't be changed post-review, so again that should have at least been caught.

kennydude 9y ago

Some keywords need to return help topics instead. If you search "virus scanner", Apple should tell users their device really doesn't need one

tyingq 9y ago
In hindsight, this seems obvious, and a great idea. Are there any "banned search keywords" now, or is it completely unrestricted? I'm curious if there's just no mechanism for this at all, or if they just aren't using it when they should.
- kennydude 9y ago
  I don't think there is, or I haven't come across any
thirdsun 9y ago
I like the idea. A friendly banner that says "Did you know that your iPhone really doesn't need Antivirus apps? Learn more..." is a nice way to educate the user. Nevertheless garbage apps like the one described here have no place in the App Store and should not be available at all.
dandare 9y ago
One could argue to the contrary; The existence (and apparent success) of scam apps like this is a clear evidence your iPhone could use a 3rd party "virus scanner" - one that would protect you from malicious "virus scanners" :p
- kennydude 9y ago
  Can they even work? It depends if iOS provides a public API for getting a list of installed apps
  - wingerlang 9y ago
    No. The only way would be to check "openURL" for known ones, but that's limited. Or from some webserver update a list of known scam ones and just tell them to uninstall them.

notadoc 9y ago

How does garbage like this get through the App Store? I thought Apple was notoriously strict on approvals? Also, do people still use the App Store? I don't think I have casually browsed for apps in 5 years or more.

alaskamiller 9y ago
But I’ve also never clicked on a Google Ad, yet Google somehow rode Adwords to $700 billion dollars today.
sausman 9y ago
I was wondering the same thing.. Maybe the developer was able to remotely flip a switch after the app went through approval to change its behavior and app review didn't catch it? What's really surprising is how long it's been out (almost 2 months)
- quaz3l 9y ago
  I can see that by using Microsoft CodePush or similar. But you can't change the description, in app purchases or title without going through the approval process again.
  - vsl 9y ago
    You definitely can the description...
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Buge 9y ago
Maybe they submitted it 100 times before it got approved. With the money at stake, the effort is worth it.
- sumoboy 9y ago
  There should be a bad app bounty for stuff like this trash.

akcreek 9y ago

How are chargebacks handled on the App store? I would assume a scam like this will receive a relatively enormous number of chargebacks.

LoSboccacc 9y ago
they will threaten to close your account if you chargeback too much.
- jtbayly 9y ago
  I tried to get a refund from Apple once, for a fraudulent app, but I never heard back. So I disputed the charge with Visa. I thought I'd solved the problem until Apple locked me out of the app store. The only way to get back to installing apps (even free ones) on my phone, if I remember right, was to use a new credit card. Later on I did successfully get a refund for being charged twice for the same content when I bought it again on a family-shared device. Free tip: in-app purchases apparently aren't sharable to the family.
  - hellbanner 9y ago
    Counter anecodote: I got a (Mac, not iOS) app refunded within 2 days because it didn't function as well as I thought it would (email client). No hassle.
- prodmerc 9y ago
  Amazing.
bartread 9y ago
I was thinking a similar thing. How many people wouldn't notice being $400/month down? Also, don't Apple email people receipts for subscription payments as for one off purchases? I mean, I'm sure there will be a few who don't notice, but it seems likely that chargebacks would be through the roof.
Merad 9y ago
I'm willing to bet that this is some kind of money laundering operation, a way to pull funds from stolen credit cards, or perhaps a way for "tech support" type scammers to get payment from their victims. Perhaps all of they above. I know some extremely technology illiterate people, but I can't think of any of them who would willingly pay $400 a month for "virus protection."

_pmf_ 9y ago

One thing of note: the spelling errors are deliberate to let only the most gullible people through to the last step (improving the odds that the person in question will not know how to report this as a scam or initiate a chargeback). The same tactics are used by ads on porn sites[0]. [0] Or so I have heard ... from a friend

slig 9y ago
There's a paper from Microsoft IIRC explaining this behavior. I'm on mobile right now, otherwise I'd find it and link it here.
- fgandiya 9y ago
  This one https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/why-do-nigerian-scammers-say-they-are-from-nigeria/?from=http%3A%2F%2Fresearch.microsoft.com%2Fpubs%2F167719%2Fwhyfromnigeria.pdf https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/why-do-...
prodmerc 9y ago
Similar thing with long sales pages. Reader doesn't know exactly what he wants, isn't convinced, but with a lot of filler mumbo jumbo and some images, maybe a video, you can get them to buy on the spot.
pthreads 9y ago
Interesting! I was wondering what the reason was. My first instinct was to assume the developer just used Google Translate or something like that and perhaps not being an English speaker was bad at spelling too. But based on your comment I am not intrigued with the possibility of it being a deliberate tactic.

blhack 9y ago

This is particularly annoying while my beta is "waiting for review" so I can have the privilege of giving it to a few beta testers. How does apple not expect that annoying developers with their app store process (so much so that things like this exist: https://fastlane.tools/ https://fastlane.tools/), AND charging them 30% AND apparently not actually reviewing anything about the apps making it into their store isn't going to eventually drive people away from it? (Why yes, I am cranky over the amount of hoops I had to jump through to get to the point of asking apple for permission to put my beta on my co-founder's iPhone)

Entangled 9y ago
I've always said that's stupidly annoying stopping me from installing apps on my own phone or on my relatives and friends as long as I do it manually using an USB cable. Also stopping beta apps from running after a week. My macOS apps run forever and I develop dozens of apps for personal use.
- robbiep 9y ago
  It's 60 days now?
joeld42 9y ago
You can use HockeyApp (https://hockeyapp.net/ https://hockeyapp.net/) or just get your friend's UDID and build an IPA yourself to distribute the build to your friend's device, even if he or she is remote. Testflight is more intended for "semi-open" betas where you only have tester's email.
- blhack 9y ago
  Thank you!
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- st3fan 9y ago

LoSboccacc 9y ago

yeah app store quality has dropped to google play levels to the point that one of ios last, actual, concrete advantage for non technical users is becoming moot.

microcolonel 9y ago
The Mac App Store seems to have been considerably worse than the Google Play store since inception. I think that the iOS app store is just coming down to the level of the Mac App Store: barely suitable for distributing Apple's own applications.
- derefr 9y ago
  They've built an entirely-new store that's shipping with iOS 11, apparently. Might fix a few things.

microcolonel 9y ago

You know, it's sad that people are eager to pay Apple nearly a thousand dollars for a phone, buy an iCloud subscription to go with it, and maybe buy a MacBook (Pro?); and then content that after all of that money changes hands, Apple still wants to fill 80% of your screen with an advertisement. Then, if it wasn't bad enough, they don't vet the advertised applications for basic legitimacy (meanwhile legitimate apps frequently get caught up in endless nitpicking at submission). I get why people do it, but it's sad that they do.

wayn3 9y ago
im really happy with my macbook. its reasonably powerful, doesnt make any noise, has an SSD and is a unix system without any of the linux haggling. paying 1k extra for not having to deal with shit was really worth it for me. certainly made sense from a quality of life perspective. and im anything but an apple fanboy.

ronalbarbaren 9y ago

Base developer's name, seem they are from Vietnam. No surprise.

hellofunk 9y ago

When I read stuff like this I really lose faith in the human race.

chinathrow 9y ago
That's my current feeling looking at the Bitcoin price chart.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

htormey 9y ago

wow, I'm pretty pissed off by this. One of my clients is a medical marijuana startup and we have had to jump through so many hoops to stay compliant with Apple's random app store rules. We have been rejected on several occasions and pulled from the app store. I also had another app that was accepted into the app store then when I pushed an update release I was informed that my logo had to change because it used Apple's camera emoji. I only did this because another popular app did the same thing (down for lunch). In order to stay compliant, I had to change my logo. I'm fine with said rules existing as in theory they are meant to protect lay customers from junk like this. How on earth did this thing make it through a review process that's so hard on some apps? I wish Apple would apply it's rules and vetting with more consistency.

kuroguro 9y ago

Brilliant! Wish I would have thought of that xD

kuon 9y ago

This kind of things make me wonder why I am honest and poor (I mean not rich to the millions, I am not actually "poor"). I could do scams like this and be rich by the minute...

morganvachon 9y ago
You said it yourself: You're honest. Take pride in that and keep being you. I have just enough knowledge and just enough free time to maybe pull off one of these kinds of scams, but two things stop me: One, I have to look at myself in the mirror every day, and two, even if I set my morals aside, given my luck, I'd be the one Apple finally decides to make an example out of and sends the feds to my doorstep.
- smnscu 9y ago
  > given my luck, I'd be the one Apple finally decides to make an example out of and sends the feds to my doorstep This usually has more to do with honest people not being good/experienced at being criminals, rather than luck.
rcarrigan87 9y ago
Scamming ends up being just as much work and hustle as doing it the right/honest way...
pcunite 9y ago
Honestly can very much mean making less. The rich are not often associated with "giving" but rather "taking".
- codedokode 9y ago
  Too much honesty can hurt your business if you are doing sales or negotiations.

prodmerc 9y ago

> I’ve also never clicked on a Google Ad. I've never done it, either. I clearly remember the only few times I clicked on AdSense ads - once by mistake, and was extremely annoyed at the results (it was a sort of list like search results), and 2-3 times to test my own AdSense ads (yeah, against ToS). Yet AdSense is raking in billions. I've always wondered who actually clicks on the ads :D

floatboth 9y ago
Bots click ads. And people paid to click ads :D
giarc 9y ago
If you are on HackerNews, you probably aren't the typical internet user. I bet my 60 year old mom clicks on tons of ads without even knowing it.
ashark 9y ago
> Yet AdSense is raking in billions. I've always wondered who actually clicks on the ads :D A lot of users have a really poor sense of what all the stuff on their screen is. Google started putting ads inline with search results for a reason. Well, reasons, rather, all of them fairly "evil", but that was one of them.
roywiggins 9y ago
The scummy DOWNLOAD NOW ads that end up on legit software download pages has got to snag more than a handful of people. They're big shiny buttons with tiny (actually an ad) disclaimers.

endgame 9y ago

At what point do you say "no, the app store experiment has failed" and give users control of their own devices? Never, I guess.

chipperyman573 9y ago
Once Apple stops making money. At 30% for every transaction, this won't happen any time soon.
amelius 9y ago
We need an extension of net neutrality (app neutrality?)

timwaagh 9y ago

finally i can be rich too! too bad i am not an ios dev. these apps are made by people from 'nam. i doubt you could do this in a civilized country without getting sued into the ground though.

ge96 9y ago

Haha I thought this was a how to guide initially as a "good entrepreneur" mind you good to me is subjective, or is it personal. Money is money right? I can't ask my clients to pay me so I obvs don't support that. Nice into the rabbit hole though, should see how bad it gets with VMs.

mark_edward 9y ago
Are you saying you're a scammer? I'm having a hard time understanding this comment
- ge96 9y ago
  No I'm not a scammer. I can't even ask my clients to pay me. Most recently these people got a big SEO audit pdf and I'm the poor bastard that has to do it for no pay hahaha. They're like "alright so... all these urls and how the db/pages work? Rewrite them..." and I'm pretty sure I'd break a good part of it, just because of how expansive the site is. (I'll decline at least on this part as it's beyond me, like being asked to integrate a PayPal recurring API payment thing) Nah they're like my second best client ever but it's still I don't get paid hourly/"a reasonable fixed price" so no in short form, I have no self respect. I was scammed once (at least), it was a site that said "Sell your ideas for money!" hahaha, I "sold my ideas" For a non-refundable fee of $99 and this also overdrew my bank account. ^^ That reinforces my original thought, I could build a similar "legit looking site" throw a payment system on there and get some poor schmuck like myself to fall for it and pay. Good job on me who built that site for say $17.00 and some time. edit: I was scammed by this lady (beat up looking face) and this guy, her "son" or whatever... they were asking for gas but insisted I give it to them in cash (at the gas station). Yeah I'm pretty stupid.
  - mark_edward 9y ago
    I see, i commiserate. I got stiffed for a months work by a recent freelance client, i empathize. I'm sorry if I slighted you, guess I read the wrong thing out of your comment. I hope you don't get scammed in the future.

blunte 9y ago

#1 - Apple has a quarter of a trillion dollars in cash. You would think they could afford intelligent, reasonable app review teams. Clearly they don't bother, based on the complaints from honest developers and evidence of pure scams like this. #2 - Average computer/phone users are willfully ignorant. I would say stupid, but that's a judgement call (even though I think it's true). Someone with knowledge can advise them, but they cannot be bothered with all that fuss. They'd rather ignore sound advice and push buttons. After all, look at the who runs the country and the complacence of many of its people. Have you ever had a friend who was a lawyer? Did you ever get some traffic ticket and think, "Hey, I'll ask Bob if he can help me handle this!"? I'm guilty of this once in a while. But "average users" are guilty of doing this to technical people all the fucking time. And when we advise them of behaviors to change to avoid future incidents, they nod and agree, but then repeat the stupid behavior later. Sorry for the rant, but perhaps it's time to just start replying to scammed/screwed users with, "Oh wow, that's really unfortunate. I guess you'll have to go buy a new phone/computer." Maybe that will jar them into actually using their brains. * Edit for wine-related typos.

CM30 9y ago
Well, they're a tiny bit better than Google when it comes to app reviewing. I mean, Google Play is literally filled to the rafters with low quality ripoffs of known franchises that clearly break every copyright and trademark law in the book, along with the kind of scams mentioned in the article. But in either case, it seems like the 'submission review process' is far more minimal than whatever Apple and Google advertise on their websites. Seems like unless a lawyer/the police/authorities send a take down notice, the companies don't give a toss about anything resembling quality control.
- blunte 9y ago
  There is some responsibility as gatekeeper of applications (especially if you make an effort to create a walled garden) to ensure some level of quality. And as this article points out, Apple obviously made little or no effort (or is very stupid? I doubt that.) Consider the potential number of new apps per day to an app store. Now imagine that each app requires 10-60 minutes of a halfway intelligent human's time to review. That's not such a huge staff required, especially compared to the revenue of said app store. Or let's be generous and reduce the responsibility of app stores to just police the top 20 or 50 apps. If, daily or weekly, the top 20 apps were reviewed for quality, that would obviously require a very small staff... and it would prevent situations like this. Ultimately, situations like this will result in class action lawsuits (like the one Amazon dealt with that resulted in them refunding a lot of childrens' in-app purchases). Perhaps what's happening is that companies decide it's just easier (organizationally) to handle legal problems than to manage business better. After all, final settlements tend to be fractions of actual costs to consumers.

fright 9y ago

While it's frustrating if taken at face value, Sensor Tower's numbers aren't totally valid. They get the number for a few of my apps really wrong. The download stats are more or less true, but the revenue can be way off.

balladeer 9y ago

And I thought Apple vets the apps (and from what I heard even betas and upgrades/updates too?) before letting it go live on the App Store. As a long time Android user (and no I wans't happy for most parts; and I wanted to taste the iOS waters both as an user and a mobile dev) who recently moved to an iPhone SE I feel really disappointed.

whyagaindavid 9y ago

Does nobody from apple read hn? How does one recommend iPhone to NGOs, privacy activists, other vulnerable people?

downandout 9y ago

There has got to be more to this story. People would refute accidental purchases of $400/mo. Perhaps these guys are using tech support scams etc to drive traffic to this thing, or they're simply using stolen credit card numbers to setup Apple App Store accounts. Perhaps that's why the spelling and layout is so bad...it's possible that they don't intend anybody outside of themselves to actually use it.

ceejayoz 9y ago
> There has got to be more to this story. People would refute accidental purchases of $400/mo. There are plenty of folks out there who pay little to no attention to what's being billed on their cards. As an example: http://www.nbcnews.com/id/14838642/ns/technology_and_science-tech_and_gadgets/t/spent-rented-rotary-phone/ http://www.nbcnews.com/id/14838642/ns/technology_and_science...
- gagege 9y ago
  Poor lady. It sounds like she may have been fully aware of what she was paying, she just never did any research to find out that she was overpaying by about 500x. Which, is almost as bad as never looking at your bank statements.
zrth 9y ago
You could even force people on the street to subscribe to the app instead of mugging them. This solved the problem that more and more people are cashless. Also you don't have to worry about selling contraband.
codedokode 9y ago
I agree, that looks suspicious. Why people would need adware removal on iPhone when there is no malware in the first place? And judging by app design it doesn't look like its developer cares about conversion.
rco8786 9y ago
> it's possible that they don't intend anybody outside of themselves to actually use it. Then why run the ads?

lordvon 9y ago

I get the feeling that companies like Amazon and Apple purposefully try to hide as much as possible/tolerable the fact that you are subscribed to something (specifically, Apple apps and Amazon's Audible). I've spent tens if not hundreds of dollars towards subscriptions I didn't even know I had, and I'm afraid this might account for a shocking amount of revenue, as this article suggests. Microsoft on the other hand seems to let you know when you are going to charged again (I've experienced this with my office license subscription).

draw_down 9y ago

There's no way that a huge portion of the blame for this is not Apple's. Some of the ways they run the App Store were pretty silly starting out, and now just outright ridiculous. Little distinction between ads and search results? No filtering or approval for ads? Scammy $100/week subscriptions for nothing? Meanwhile you're not allowed to make fun of the presidents elbows or whatever. Come on.

jitbit 9y ago

Yeah. And Apple just rejected my app because it has a 'register free trial' link. Which is actually free, actually a trial, no CC info asked, no in-app purchase. Their response was "if you offering something - you should be using in-app purchases". Oh. OK.