Fake crypto wallet in the App Store operated for a week and stole millions

Apple has urgently removed from the App Store a fake crypto wallet called Ledger Live, which managed to steal at least 50 users for a total of more than $ 7 million. The fake app appeared in the store on April 7 and operated smoothly for several days — until CoinDesk journalists drew attention to it.

Among the victims, three lost particularly large sums: more than $ 3.2 million in USDT, more than $ 2 million in USDC, and about $ 2 million in Bitcoin, Ethereum, and stETH. The fraudsters targeted holders of several cryptocurrencies at once — Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, Tron, and XRP.

Investigators found that the stolen funds were deposited to KuCoin exchange addresses associated with a service for confusing cryptocurrency transactions. After the investigation was published, Apple removed the fake and blocked the developer’s account.

Almost at the same time, the Freecash service, which was actively promoted on TikTok under the guise of easy money for watching videos, disappeared from the store. According to TechCrunch, the program was actually collecting sensitive user data, such as health, religion, race, and sexual life, and using it to target mobile ads. The journalists also found out that Freecash had actually returned to the App Store through another developer account, bypassing the previous blocking.

Apple reminded that last year alone, it rejected or removed more than 17 thousand applications for substituting the declared functionality and blocked more than 37 thousand suspicious programs before publication. However, the new incidents show that even such large-scale filtering does not guarantee user safety — fraudsters find new ways.