Scammers often want to enrich themselves at someone else's expense. Modern technologies allow people to be deceived now on the internet. There are various types of scams, one of the popular ones being a phishing site. When choosing a victim, scammers slowly but surely try to win over the potential victim. Often communication happens online through correspondence, romantic interactions, or friendly offers. After befriending the victim, the perpetrators suggest making investments using cryptocurrency, which leads to disastrous results.
Fake investment apps are programs that mimic the operation of familiar apps. This allows them to display malicious ads with harmful programs. To work with investors, it is better to download apps from verified official sources to avoid fraudulent programs.
Often, fake apps look entirely like clones of real ones, and there may be a match in logos and content. The viral programs of fake apps have the properties of tracking user actions on the phone, which can lead to information theft or unauthorized access to assets or bank cards. The spread of malicious viral programs occurs through the distribution of apps in messengers, SMS messages, or on websites of official electronic stores of well-known brands.
How to protect yourself from fraudulent apps and secure yourself, you should know a few factors:
- if an ad pops up on social networks about a quick way to earn a lot of money - it should be perceived as a scam;
- financial scammers often use social networks and various messengers. This helps them hide from law enforcement and work with inexperienced people in the financial field;
- funds proposed to be deposited on unknown suspicious trading or investment portals are often not refundable.
- if there are doubts before making a financial transaction, it is better to contact the consumer protection center, which can check, together with the police, the suspiciousness of the app.
Signs of a fake investment app
Imitation – looks like the logo of an official program, has an identical name and functions, but contains a malicious link. This is investment app fraud.
Repackaging - a more complex type of app that an inexperienced user will not notice immediately. These types of apps use stolen metadata from official sources. They carry the same name and avatar, but the source code is repackaged undergoing modification beforehand.
There are such types of content and links with fake apps:
- Advertising Bots;
- Botnet;
- Fraudulent payments;
- Loaders with malicious programs;
- Content with hostile information;
- Phishing;
- Ransomware programs;
- Increased level of legal obligations;
- Spams;
- Spyware programs;
- Trojans.
When working with cryptocurrency, fake apps engage in substituting addresses displayed in interfaces during deposit or withdrawal of funds. If the user initiates a monetary process, at that moment, their assets fall into the account of the scammers. This is the most common method of online fraud through which investors lose their money.
Before using such operations for large amounts, it is advisable to make a small test investment.
Safe investment apps
Ellevest - one of the leading apps for socially responsible investing.
Charles Schwab - considered the simplest and easiest app for beginner investors.
Fidelity Investments - no less popular app for asset management, can replace several financial apps at once.
Wealthfront - is an independent robo-advisor in the field of asset management and investment.
Wealthbase - the best app serving as an addition to stock market trades.
These are far from all safe apps.
How to recognize fake investment apps.
Before proceeding to download the app, make sure it does not have the following signs:
- Distorted icon appearance (scammers make the app as similar to the original as possible);
- Unnecessary permission requests (official app privacy policy does not request many unnecessary permissions);
- Suspicious reviews (a large number of positive or negative reviews attract attention);
- Small number of downloads (obviously, popular apps will have more downloads than fake ones);
- Deceptive information about creators and organization contacts;
- Recent creation date of the app (contact with a recent date and a large number of inflated downloads or reviews) raises suspicion, most likely it is fake.