The Apple app store hosted children’s games with secret pockets inside

In popular culture, access to an illicit gambling den is as easy as stumbling into the right store and saying your password – or slapping your hands. Apple’s App Store seems to have a real-life parallel: today, app developer Kosta Eleftheriou discovered a terrible children’s game that is actually a front for gambling sites.

The secret password isn’t something you’ll probably guess: you need to be in the right country – or pretend to be in the right country using a VPN.

But then, instead of launching an ugly endless monkey runner game, full of typos and errors, the same app launches a casino experience:

The “Jungle Runner 2k21” app has already disappeared from the App Store, probably due to advertising in Gizmodo and Fireing Fireball, who each wrote about Eleftheriou’s discovery earlier today.

He’s not the only one, though: the same developer, “Colin Malachi,” had another incredibly simple game on the App Store called “Magical Forest – Puzzle,” which was also a gambling front. I’ve tried both, and here’s some visual evidence:

Here’s what Magical Forest looked like when you opened it in the United States:

I accessed them from a VPN server in Turkey; While Fireing Fireball notes that users in other countries outside the US, such as Italy, also seem to have been able to access gambling sites, I tried them with several locations, including Italy, without success.

Unlike the multi-million dollar scams on the App Store that Eleftheriou discovered earlier this year, it’s not hard to see why Apple’s App Store review program could have missed them – they look great measure like the typical shovel, if you don’t know the trick a handful of stories … such as the fact that Jungle Runner uses a Pastebin for its privacy policies:

It is not necessarily clear to me that it would violate many Apple App Store policies. Gambling applications are allowed by Apple, as long as they are geo-restricted to the regions where gambling is allowed by law, and you may claim that this is exactly what this developer did by verifying your IP address. But I imagine Cupertino would have frowned upon a gambling application disguised in a child’s play in both directions – and Eleftheriou suggests that gambling sites could also cheat people with money.

Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.