The recent developments regarding malicious Bitcoin wallets appearing in the Apple App Store has many people on edge right now. Several users have reported funds being stolen from them, and the totals are adding up quickly. So far, one of the addresses identified as being used by these malicious web wallets contains over US$20,000 in Bitcoin.
While Apple is still not planning to take much action against these fake Bitcoin wallets in their App Store, more details are becoming available regarding the people who downloaded them. One Bitcoin user even claims to have lost US$10,000, which is quite a significant amount. But the total losses due to these malicious apps is much bigger than that, unfortunately.
Breadwallet co-founder Aaron Voisine told Motherboard how he noticed there was over US$20,000 in one Bitcoin address used by the developers of these fake wallets. This seems to confirm initial suspicions of how any funds stored in these iOS apps would slowly be sluiced away to a Bitcoin address controlled by internet criminals.
While Apple has been receiving multiple reports about these malicious Bitcoin wallets, more seem to be popping up every week. It’s hard to discern between a real and fake wallet app, as the source code being used is legitimate. In fact, the majority of these scam applications use the Breadwallet code.
Apple users need to be very careful when downloading and installing a Bitcoin wallet application from the App Store these days. There are only a few legitimate offerings available, and everything else should be avoided at all costs. It is evident Apple will need to step up their game to address these issues sooner rather than later.
That remains the biggest mystery of this entire story own do these apps even get approved in the first place. While there is no indication of this being an inside job, the vetting process for financial apps will need to be improved by quite a margin. If the company allows this many fake Bitcoin wallets, who knows what other types of harmful apps are in their financial section right now.
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