Google is suing two Chinese app developers, alleging they spent years creating fraudulent cryptocurrency investment apps downloaded from its Play Store.
Shows a scammer his own face!
According to a Google complaint filed earlier this week, Yunfeng Sun, AKA Alphonse Sun, and Hongnam Cheung, AKA Zhang Hongnim and Stanford Fischer, from Shenzhen and Hong Kong, respectively, developed 87 scam apps between 2014 and 2019, causing financial harm to at least 100,000 people over the whole world, or so the tech giant claims.
Sun and Cheung's apps purported to be either cryptocurrency exchanges or crypto investment platforms, all promising big returns on investment. Their approach changed slightly with each app, but what the tech giant claims via its lawsuit is that the underlying crime remained the same.
Victims would deposit real money into these apps that appear to show balances rising and falling in line with fluctuating real-world crypto exchange rates, but the effects were "illusory," the complaint filed in the Southern District of New York [PDF] alleges.
