The crypto industry, with an estimated market cap of over $2 trillion and money-making opportunities, continues to onboard new investors regularly. At the same time, fraudsters continue to up their game to separate users from their money.
One of the methods the cybercriminal uses is crypto apps. According to security researchers at the Lookout Threat Lab, almost 200 Android apps, including 26 on the Google Play Store, claim to offer cloud cryptocurrency mining services to interested people for a fee but are in actuality not doing anything.
These apps have accepted funds from customers worth over $350,000. These fees, as they claim, are payments for mining crypto. The Lookout researchers also discovered that BitScam and CloudScam are the two main brands behind the crypto apps used in defrauding users.
The report revealed why it is so hard for victims to detect these scam apps saying:
” [They] are able to fly under the radar because they don’t actually execute any malicious code. By using legitimate payment processes, the brands enable these apps to collect money for services that don’t exist. Even though the apps that were found on the Play Store have been removed, others are still circulating on third-party app stores.”
To avoid paying huge electricity bills associated with mining or buying expensive mining devices, some crypto users rent cloud computing power at a cheaper rate to mine.
However, scam apps like those built by BitScam and CloudScam are out there to dupe these unsuspecting victims of their money.
In a similar case of crypto scams, Coinfomania had earlier reported of the investigation the Brazilian Federal Police from the Curitiba Metropolitan Region are carrying out on a group.
Heading the group is Claudio Oliveira, the Brazilian self-named “Bitcoin King”, who is currently facing charges for bankruptcy crimes, embezzlement, money laundering, and operating a criminal organization in Brazil.
The man in question duped customers of his fraudulent crypto scheme of 1.5 billion Brazilian reais ( approximately $300 million) after allegedly entering into irregular contracts with them.
