She's suing Google for the 5M she lost because "she believed Google was successfully preventing scam apps from becoming available on the Google Play store." and not because it took them so long to take the scammer's app down. If they'd done it within 5 minutes it wouldn't have stopped her from losing her money.<p>I think google should be held accountable for not removing a malicious app from their app store within a reasonable amount of time, but I'm less sure that Google should be on the hook for the money scammers take. Google can and should do a lot more to prevent malicious apps on their platform, and they should be required to respond quickly when the ones they failed to detect are reported to them, but a play store that only allowed/contained apps that Google was 100% confident could never be used to scam another person wouldn't be very useful.
It still boggles my mind that you can build a fortune of several million, but then be naive enough to download a random <i>crypto</i> app off the app store, and expect it to be all sunshine and rainbows. Even several massive legalish crypto empires fell over due to fraud. Using a random one off the app store is a recipe for disaster.
This is the company profiting from the obvious fraud, de-funding departments designed to block such frauds, and with a history of using their size to blunder past any legislative sanctions. I'm shocked, _shocked_ I tell you that the fraud benefiting them personally was allowed to go on for so long.<p>In less sarcastic news, I'm legitimately surprised it was dropped in only 3 months. That's a better than average outcome.
Possibly an unpopular view but I can't but think the FTC should be able to issue directions to Google and others which have almost instant effect. "this is a scam, shut it down" should not require them to "get back to you about that" if it comes from the Trade Commission.<p>I am pretty much all-in on more government regulation of Google. Not less. There should be a non-negotiable access path to ask why things happen and an appeals process to their lockouts for end users too. Mandatory human-in-the-loop review.
I've reported am explicitly Temu ad a million times and it still keeps appearing. I don't understand why they even have the report feature if they're not going to do anything about it. Feel so helpless.
This seems to be a screenshot of the app, the app offered no transaction fee buying of crypto:<p><a href="https://play-lh.googleusercontent.com/0kI_n_a9ntn9iiispSqN-YaCjwR9j7BExFWiLYjrii4TXl7VcYnzoUo-0KVx66Fk1B38=h1024-rw" rel="nofollow">https://play-lh.googleusercontent.com/0kI_n_a9ntn9iiispSqN-Y...</a>
I lost 1 ETH worth of crypto in scam. It was something on the lines of you invest your crypto, and they'd put it up on art assets that would increase in value and you'd get your returns back.<p>I got no returns when I wanted to take it out. Just fake UI showing it was going up when it wasn't.<p>It was a great reminder, that crypto is full of scam. It's not even a great asset to hedge against inflation as it's heavily speculated on. I took all my crypto out and went back to good ol stocks, bonds and gold.<p>Soooooooooooooo much crypto scam.
I don't know anything about this app, and this is the first time I'm hearing about it. Does this app somehow generate revenue? Is that the reason it took them so long to act? Or is it that so few people downloaded it, resulting in fewer complaints compared to the number of downloads? I know Google has been getting worse over time. I'm just trying to understand why it took them so long to act when they actively penalize smaller developers!
Google really doesn't want people to know what goes on in pay to win games.<p>While they aren't outright fraud, they are right there. And those apps probably make billions a year.
for the interested, there is also the case of scorp detailed in forbes article below
<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2021/02/02/porn-app-network-scamming-iphone-users-for-26m-per-month-says-apps-exposed/?sh=305313a07129" rel="nofollow">https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2021/02/02/porn-ap...</a>
Poor woman succumbed to pig butchering scam. Not sure if this is the same woman or not, but I recall another pig butchering scam where the victim also sent family funds to scammer.<p>Honestly, this person must really be well off to be able to send $5M at any time and then be able to keep a lawyer on retainer to litigate against big G
This is an example of blatant, obvious scam, but there are also many many others that are technically fine, but effectively end up with the "customer" feeling scammed anyway.<p>Example: There are many apps that will only let you use the functionality if you agree to a 7 day free trial, which automatically starts billing you some exorbitant <i>weekly</i> fee as soon as that trial ends. Google will typically not refund this when a scammed user complains, since they technically agreed to the terms.<p>But IMO this is absolute bullshit. $50/week for a stupid flashlight app is not reasonable anywhere. It shows that the only intent of the app is to trick people. No real user would consider paying that much for what the app offers.<p>But Google benefits from this, so they do absolutely nothing about it, and the play store is full of such crap. The Google/Apple tax on every purchase you make on their platforms is pure profit, none of it is used to make the store better for the customers or genuine sellers.<p>I will avoid spending a single ₹ on these platforms as a result, and will try to avoid ever writing code for their platforms. Either my app succeeds on the open web, or it doesn't succeed at all. I'm willing to give up on the entire mobile market due to this, I'll not be part of a system that exists majorly to trick people into parting with their money and data.
Not victim blaming but wow. Some people are really naive yet they can still have so much money while very high IQ people struggle to make money due to their lack of social skills.
I don't think we should blame the victim. Tech is insanely complex and some scams are so sophisticated now that if you're not switched on all the time you might get caught. The vector here seems to be an app posing as something trustworthy. Or what she claims as an app riding the reputation of Google. But to me its the same issue underlying phishing: impersonation.<p>Is impersonation fundamentally unpatchable? How does one ever really 'know for certain' that an app, website, etc, is legit? Could this be fixed, once-and-for-all, with something like a hardware device issued to all citizens with early education around scams? Or would scammers still find ways around it with things like misspellings, subtle details in presentation, or what-ever have you.
That's amazing, it took them 3 months to kill a scam app, but they proactively shutdown smaller apps that break no rules constantly. I swear someone in Google's exec team is going out of their way to make Google products suck. They've all been getting worse for the past several years. Search gives bad results, search qualifiers only work in "verbatim" mode, GMail sucks at spam filtering now, Android is becoming a PITA, Chrome is shoving in new bad features while killing old good features, etc. There was even a big thing about Google Voice having some massive change where lots of features were going away, so I pulled GV out of my life expecting it to go away, and literally nothing changed.<p>It's almost like Google is suicidal and these are calls for help.