Entrepreneur Kosta Eleftheriou made the mission of his life to reveal misleading iOS apps, and his latest discovery is a dose. He found a game called Jungle Run – basically a 2D coin-rolling game – that turns into a cryptocurrency-funded casino in Turkey.
The app is currently live Apple App Store and claims it’s a “fun running game.” When you install it, you see the terms and conditions of the app in what appears to be a website window inside the app. The terms, unusually, are stored on a Pastebin page that appears for a moment and then disappears.
Once you start the application, you are presented with a game that seems to have been made by a class student:
Normal users would delete this application instantly. But, there is a surprise if you seem to be in Turkey based on your IP address.
Instead of showing you the game of monkeys, a web casino appears asking you to finance your online wallet with cash and various cryptocurrencies. Puzzled by this, I decided to give it a try. I downloaded the game and tried it in the US. The game of awful monkeys came, as expected. Then I changed my location via VPN using Proton VPN, and voila: here comes a roulette wheel and a request to surround the in-app purchase system and fund a casino wallet.
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“Alternative app stores that focus on security rather than revenue would do a much better job than Apple,” Eleftheriou said. “The iPhone already has enough system-level protection for this to work, and Apple needs to give up the security theater that harms consumers every day.”
The creator of the application, Colin Malachi, was impossible to find online, but Eleftheriou said that the scam has been going on for months. The app itself has no reviews and was last updated on January 23, 2021, probably to add the terms of service screen.
Here is a video of the application running before and after setting the IP address in Turkey.
The application is still live from this writing.
“Like the icing on the cake, the people in the reviews say that they deposited large sums for the promise of a bonus, but they never received the promised payments. To everyone’s surprise, the scammers do not even operate a fair casino, “Eleftheriou said.
I asked for comments from Apple, but it’s best to avoid this app, especially if you’re in Turkey.