Every year, a lot of fake apps find their way on both Google Play Store and Apple App Store, and the latest ones to join the frenzy are fraudulent trading apps that lure victims into “pig butchering” scams. In case you are wondering, pig butchering is a type of scam that makes investors believe they are getting high returns on their investments by making up numbers. Scammers often use social engineering techniques to prevent the user from withdrawing their pseudo profit and encourage users to keep on investing more and more money. According to a recent report by BleepingComputer citing cybersecurity firm Group-IB, these fake trading apps, which belong to the “UniShadowTrade” family of malware, were first spotted earlier this year in May and are built using the UniApp framework. Some of the most popular apps that lured unsuspecting users include SBI-INT (iOS), Finans Insights (Android), and Finans Trader6 (Android). The cybersecurity group also said that these fake trading apps are capable of impersonating legitimate cryptocurrency and trading platforms as well. In the image below, you can see some of the names used by these fake trading apps. The report goes on to say that some of these apps even hid themselves as tools for “algebraic mathematical formulas and 3D graphic volume area calculations” on iOS and “financial news feed aggregators” on Android. Once installed, they redirected users to fake trading platforms which can only be used via invitation codes, with some fraudsters even engaging their victims in conversations over dating apps to gain trust. While these apps are now removed from the official Android and iOS app stores, they had been downloaded by thousands of people before being detected. Since then, these scamsters have reportedly migrated to phishing websites. To stay safe from pig butchering scams, make sure you do some research about the background of the investment trading platform you are signing up for and see if it is registered or regulated by your local body.
