iPhone user blames Apple for $600K Bitcoin theft via fake app | Hacker News Reader

iPhone user blames Apple for $600K Bitcoin theft via fake app

cointelegraph.com

26 pointswalterbell20 comments

Apple is pretty bad at regulating "free" apps. There are so many apps pretend to be free only the first screen you will see is ask you for a subscription or exit. I have tried to report an app like this, and gone nowhere. I feel that AppStore is taking money over protecting people nowadays.

Why spend their $16B per quarter in profit from App Store on moderation when they can just put most of it in the bank?

It's so absurd we're not forcing companies like Apple and Facebook to use 99% of their profit for moderation until adequate systems, protocols and processes are in place.

> I feel that AppStore is taking money over protecting people nowadays.

While they could certainly do better in cleaning out shitty apps, Apple has always given me a refund for dodgy apps without question, almost always within a day.

App too buggy? Too overpriced? Tinder boost that went bust? No problem.

Meanwhile apps that use their own payment mechanisms, like crappy Couchsurfing, basically just ignore all my emails.

No other digital store has covered my ass this much from predatory developers.

Steam comes to mind - routinely banning developers who post fake reviews for their own products, and banning developers who threatened legal actions towards customers over negative reviews.

Steam is a close second, but they denied me a refund for Frostpunk (great game) because the publisher falsely listed it as Mac compatible. It was an empty download, but trying to launch it still ticked off Steam’s time limit for refunds, apparently.

They finally released a Mac version after about 100 years and it was worth it though.

I am sure they do better for paid apps, somehow the introduction of in-app purchase created many "free" apps. I had one would link you to a webpage to make payment on third party platform. The free trial was $1 and the other choice is yearly subscription of $800 or something. I am sure they violated appstore policy using third party payment system, but reporting the app was not easy because it is a "free" app.

In this case I would blame Apple.

They were notified, they kept letting the bad app back in. I rather suspect there's something dirty inside Apple.

It's easy enough to get into the App Store, and I suspect with the new number of applications they get every day, they can't manually monitor each one.

You're not wrong... but it invite the question "If Apple can't prevent malicious software from being listed, what is the purpose of a centralized app store?"

It allows them to keep the walled garden intact. A 3rd party app marketplace would need to install apps to the device and would require a different permissions model to anything available on the App Store today.

The easiest way in isn't even writting an app, just provide a dylib that solves a common problem, get it into an answer on a site like StackOverflow and you now can run whatever you want on plenty of devices.

Remember Apple doesn't instrument the Apps when they review them, the closest they come to that is running everything through a proxy and looking for connections that are obviously malicious. This is one of the massive holes in the wall that Facebook often walks through.

You had the option of "rotten". It was right there. Like low-hanging fruit.

I think it's something not to attribute to malice.

...can you slice an apple with Hanlon's razor?

What does someone with a hardware wallet expect? If you can just use a phone app, then use a phone app. But if you want the convenience of an app, what do you expect the hardware wallet to do exactly?

One nice thing about bitcoin is it tends to make a lack of real security more obvious.

Eventually people will realize app stores do little to add security but until then Apple and Google will continue to abuse their position as software curators and change the public perception of software.

Another example of lack of regulation is not a feature - it's a crippling fault. Most people rather have their savings in something that legal systems can recoup in case of blatant theft.

This guy lost his life savings.

Regardless of it its reasonable, I predict he will not get a dime of it back, from Apple or anyone else

While I agree with you I also think that Google and Apple have some responsibility here. They advertise their platforms are safe and secure but you have a lot of applications blatantly impersonating legitimate companies and it can take quite some time for stores to remove them.

It's a very common issues for the Cardano blockchain, their official wallet "Daedalus" is desktop-only but almost every week you have a new "Daedalus mobile" fake app (i.e it will steal your coins) made available on the App Store and Play Store from a fake company (with a name close to IOHK, the developer of Cardano) and it takes literally days for stores to react.

When money used to have a firm link to the real world, when it was lost (like when gold coins sunk to the bottom of the sea or were stolen by pirates) it was really lost.

Certainly it can been seen as a "feature" of the current fiat currency regime that your lost/stolen money can be "recovered". But it can also been seen as a "crippling fault" when this "feature" can be so easily exploited by those running the system.

Dude, it's not a feature that someone who makes a trivial mistake in a banking application they don't fully understand can have all their money stolen with no recourse.

It kinda is...

1) dont play with what you don't understand 2) dont expect others to make your decisions for you 3) dont expect authorities to bail you out when you mess up

This deference to authority to protect your money is exactly the world that bitcoin was made to avoid. It is exactly why your bank money is not in your control, and self-custodian bitcoin IS money you control. It is a feature, it is desirable. ("But I can spend the money in the bank however I like..." Not quite. You are only allowed to do what the bank will let you do.)

Theft, Loss and Fraud are not good things, for sure, but their existence is not an excuse to ignore personal responsibility.

Cheers for unregulated money

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