Developer Kosta Eleftheriou has developed in the last few months the ability to find scams in the App Store. And the most recent one he exhibited is quite interesting. The application disguises itself as a child’s play, but in reality it is an online casino that bypasses Apple’s in-app purchase system and seems to deceive users for unknown amounts.
Kosta talked about this latest scam he discovered on Twitter today. In the description, “Jungle Runner 2k21” claims that it is a “fun running game” for over 4 years old (Apple seems to have shot the game in the US). However, for those who open the game from an IP address in Turkey (or with a VPN), the application is actually a crooked online casino that uses its own payment system.
In particular, we saw another case in which a developer slipped a banned Iranian app into the App Store with the same strategy.
Kosta also detailed the misleading ads the developer is using for Jungle Runner – fake CNN Turk features – to lure users.
Kosta says the game, which appears in the US and elsewhere, works, but is “extremely simple and very poorly designed.”
He believes that since users trust the App Store, people think they need to be sure to try the app:
Kosta says that Jungle Runner has been on the App Store for a few months and has received several successful updates through Apple. And some of the reviews say that users were cheated out of large sums of money and did not receive what they bought.
It seems that the developer Jungle Runner had another application that pulls the same scam.
Last month, after publicly exposing a variety of abuses in the App Store, Kosta filed a lawsuit against Apple for “monopoly muscle” and failure to control App Store scams.
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