A Girl from Prague helped Google remove scam apps that made ₹3.7 crore

A little girl from Prague has helped security researchers to find and flag seven scam apps on the Google Play and the Apple App Store. As per the SensorTower reports, these apps were downloaded more than 2.4 million times, and the creators of these malicious rogue apps made more than Rs 3.7 crore before being deleted. These seven apps were adware scams that looked like wallpaper, music, or entertainment apps.

Shockingly, these apps were promoted on Instagram and TikTok and were primarily targeted at children. These apps were managing to stay hidden successfully until this girl reported a TikTok profile promoting one of the apps to Avast's Be Safe Online project in the Czech Republic. This project from Avast educated kids on how to stay safe online.

Avast examined the apps and revealed that these ads were aggressively displaying and charging users between $ 2 and $ 10 to remove them. The apps provided simple games that "just make the device vibrate, wallpapers or music," Avast said. Some of the applications were HiddenAds Trojans masked as a secure application but displaying intrusive advertisements.

These ads were served outside the app, and the original app icon was hidden so that users couldn't figure out where the ads were coming from. The hidden icons also meant that these apps were difficult to detect and uninstall, furthermore, these apps were displaying ads even when they were not being used.

After the security researchers were alerted, they notified both Apple and Google. As per reports, Google has already removed the apps, although Apple has yet to respond.

TikTok and Instagram users with millions of followers were promoting these apps to entice people to install them, and the researchers found multiple profiles with between 5,000 and 3.3 million followers who had promoted these apps.

One of Avast's threat analysts praised the girl's presence of mind, noting that it was particularly concerning that these apps are being promoted on social media platforms that are popular with children. Young children who are mostly unaware and unable to recognize the red flags surrounding these malicious apps and fall victim to them.