Google is suing two developers who put 87 fake investing and crypto apps on Google Play. The Alphabet-owned company told Quartz it’s the first Big Tech firm to take on crypto fraud.
“Keeping people safe online is core to our business and we will not tolerate the misuse of our platforms to facilitate cryptocurrency scams,” said the company’s General Counsel Halimah DeLaine Prado in a statement. “This litigation is a critical step in holding these bad actors accountable and sending a clear message that we will aggressively pursue those who seek to take advantage of our users.”
In its complaint filed in the Southern District of New York Thursday, Google said the scammers lured about 100,000 users to the apps, with names like SkypeWallet and Starlight.
Starlight, for example, was marketed for Ghanians in videos on TikTok and Instagram as a way to earn money by watching videos and completing tasks. Starlight asked people to invest money before they began to earn it, but never gave it back nor paid users as promised. SkypeWallet and another app, TionRT, posed as a crypto exchanges, but also failed to generate returns on users’ investments.
Shady crypto schemes have been on the rise since the pandemic. Last year, federal regulators took action against the biggest cryptocurrency exchanges, Coinbase, FTX, and Binance, or their founders. In perhaps the most high-profile case, FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried was convicted of stealing at least $10 billion from investors and sentenced to 25 years in prison.
Other schemes were also exposed. A YouTuber was charged by the Securities and Exchange Commission for defrauding investors of about $1 billion and using it to buy himself shiny things like Rolex watches. Federal and state investigators probed the founder of cryptocurrency lender Celsius over fraud concerns.
Google has taken direct legal action against scammers before. The company sued anonymous individuals at the end of last year for promoting fake versions of its AI chatbot Bard (rebranded as Gemini) that were actually malware.
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