Crypto scam apps on Google Play and Apple App Store? Know how pig butchering works

tech.hindustantimes.com:

A new type of online scam has surfaced recently. Known as the “pig butchering” scam (literal translation from sha zhu pan, meaning pig butchering plate), it is a type of romance scam where a scammer would connect with the victim, usually on a dating site or a social media website, and will show romantic interest in the victim. But before too long, the fraudster would scam the victim out of all their money. But this scam is getting scarier as scammers are taking the path of crypto to easily steal the money without being tracked. And to win the trust of the victims, scammers are sneaking in fraudulent crypto apps into Google Play and Apple App Store, a cybersecurity company has found.

Researchers at the cybersecurity company Sophos have published a report where they found that earlier these scammers would find ad-hoc methods to drop these crypto apps in the victim's device but now they were getting even more malicious.

“Recently, we discovered CryptoRom apps that defeated Apple's and Google's app-store security review processes, making their way into the official stores. Victims of the scam alerted us to the applications and shared details of the criminal operations behind them. In the process of researching the applications, we found other apps and uncovered information about the organizations behind these scam operations,” the report stated.

It should be noted that these scammers are experts in hacking and are involved in domain manipulation to get their apps into the marketplaces. The scammers would first submit an application with a valid certificate issued by Apple. As long as the app is in the review phase, it will function as described and would be entirely benign. But once the review process is complete and the app is