The new Android “scamware” scheme may have cost smartphone owners hundreds of millions of dollars without even knowing it.
The mentioned scam was called “Dark Herring” by a member of the security company Zimperium zLabs, Hothardware reports.
Scamware has been registered in 470 different applications in the Google Play Store, since it was first noticed in March 2020.
Fake apps, which have been installed by more than 105 million users in 70 countries, subscribe their victims to fake premium services. Dark Herring subscriptions cost $ 15 a month, and scamware doesn’t even need a user’s payment card to successfully cheat.
Dark Herring used anti-virus detection capabilities, benefited from the fact that it is available on a large number of applications, performed code blurring, and other machinations in order to extort hundreds of millions of dollars from Android users.
To attract victims, the campaign offered malicious websites that used the geolocation of the user’s IP address to display content in the local language and asked the user for a phone number to verify. In reality, the site sent phone numbers to the Direct Carrier Billing service, which charged a $ 15 monthly subscription.
With this type of fraud, the user does not immediately recognize that he is the victim since nothing appears on their cards or bank statement. Zimperium zLabs points out that Dark Herring is a scam in the longest-running mobile SMS segment, which this company has discovered so far.
The apps, which were part of this chain, have been removed from the Google Play Store and are no longer a threat from there, but could still exist on some other platforms.