According to an investigation by “Trend Micro”, Google is throwing eight cloud mining apps that are suspicious of scams from the Playstore.
The Japanese company Trend Micro Incorporated has eight cloud mining apps from the Google Playstore examined and found that many of the apps examined were fraudulent in nature. With the current fulminant price fireworks on the cryptocurrency market, one should remember a problem that has always been associated with Bitcoin – scams. Only this year there were major scams again, such as the AfriCrypt Scam, in which investors were cheated out of millions of US dollars. One study According to, almost every third crypto investor has been the victim of a scam in the crypto space.
Trend Micro, a company listed on the stock exchange, immediately forwarded the knowledge it gained about the malicious apps to the Google support team. Which in turn immediately threw the applications from the Google Playstore. The following apps are no longer available in the Playstore:
- BitFunds – crypto cloud mining
- Bitcoin Miner – cloud mining
- Bitcoin (BTC) – pool mining cloud wallet
- Crypto Holic – Bitcoin Cloud Mining
- Daily Bitcoin Rewards – cloud-based mining system
- Bitcoin 2021
- MineBit Pro – Crypto Cloud Mining & BTC Miner
- Ethereum (ETH) – pool mining cloud.
Tips to expose scams in the Google Playstore
In addition, the Trend Micro report gives the following tips in order to find out about scammers in the Google Playstore and to protect your wallet from unnecessary losses:
- Reviews in the playstore. Even the big Silicon Valley companies are feeling more and more that fake and bought reviews are a problem, more than 200 million reviews are said to have been deleted on Amazon alone in 2020. It is not uncommon to buy star ratings – also in the Google Playstore. So you should be skeptical if an app out of 5,000 reviews 4,997 has a five-star rating. You should take a close look at the reviews. You should especially take a close look at the one to three star ratings.
- Test the allegedly fraudulent crypto app with a wrong wallet address. Trend Micro has tested the apps of numerous developers in the Google Playstore. The analyzes showed that it was often possible to enter an incorrect wallet address with which the app was still working. It was often enough to simply enter any value in the fields for the app to work. If the application can work with a wrong wallet address, there is a high probability that the app is fake.
- Restart the app. Often times, mining apps only work like a kind of simulation. They calculate and perform operations with freely made-up variables. If you restart a fake app, the simulation may be interrupted. If you then open the app again, the simulation also restarts. And you can spot a fake.
- Withdrawal Fee. Almost every transaction in the crypto market costs money. Even big exchanges like Binance or Coinbase often charge a processing fee for withdrawals. Most of the transfers in the scam projects were free of charge – an indication of fraud.
Beware, more fraudulent apps on the market
According to Trend Micro’s research, there are still over 120 fraudulent apps in the Google Playstore. Applications developed by fraudsters try to deceive customers in a variety of ways. Scams are, for example, that the app has to be bought before it can be used, others tempt the user to click on advertising banners and still others try to encourage them to buy apps in order to participate in fraudulent crypto mining profits.
As is so often the case in waters close to Kypto, you should rather exercise double caution if the hard-earned money is to stay in your own wallet. Last but not least, there is one rule of thumb to keep in mind: Apps that promise astronomical returns are usually too good to be true.