Entrepreneur Kosta Eleftheriou has become the mission of his life to expose scamming iOS apps, and his latest discovery is a doozie. He found a game called Jungle Run, basically a 2D coin run game, which becomes a cryptocurrency-funded casino in Turkey.
The application is currently live Apple App Store and claims to be a “fun running game.” When you install it, you will see the terms of service of the app in what appears to be a website window within the app. The terms are unusually stored on a Pastebin page that appears for a moment and then disappears.
Once you start the app, you are presented with a game that looks like it was made by an elementary student:
Normal users would delete this app instantly. But there is a surprise if it looks like you are in Turkey according to your IP address.
Instead of showing you the monkey game, a web-based casino appears asking you to fund your online wallet with cash and various cryptocurrencies. Bewildered by this, I decided to give it a try myself. I downloaded the game and tried it in the United States. The terrible game of monkeys arrived as expected. Then I changed my location via VPN using Proton VPN, and voila: a roulette wheel appears and a request to go through the purchase system built into the Apple app and fund an incomplete casino wallet.
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“Alternative app stores that focus on security rather than revenue would do a much better job than Apple,” Eleftheriou said. “The iPhone already has enough system-level protections to make this work, and Apple has to drop the security theater that harms consumers every day.”
The creator of the app, Colin Malachi, was impossible to find online, but Eleftheriou said the scam has been running for months. The app itself has no reviews and was last updated on January 23, 2021, presumably to add to the brazen terms of service screen.
Here is a video of the application running before and after setting the IP address in Turkey.
The application is still active at this time.
“Like the icing on the cake, people in the reviews say he made large sums for a promise of a bonus, but never received the promised payments. Not surprisingly, scammers don’t even operate a fair casino,” he said. Eleftheriou.
We’ve asked Apple for feedback, but it’s best to avoid this app, especially if you’re in Turkey.