More than 500 thousand users were deceived by the fake version of WhatsApp on Google Play

The app was available on Google Play for about a month, but now it seems to have been removed. The post More than 500 thousand users were deceived by the fake version of WhatsApp on Google Play appeared first on Safir Arjan.

The app was available on Google Play for about a month, but now it seems to have been removed.

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Fake and cloned apps on Google Play have become a serious security problem. Some time ago, a report was published about a fake Google Chrome app that was downloaded more than 100,000 times before it was removed from the store. But now a cloned version of WhatsApp on Google Play has compromised the security of users.

Recently, a cloned application of WhatsApp was displayed in the advertising results section of the search for the original version of this messenger. According to Google Play, this fake version has been downloaded about half a million times. This fake app released by a developer named Augment Assets sallu is the only app available in this developer's account. The page that was released under the name "WhatsApp" resembled the original version in every way and even used images and description text from the official WhatsApp page.

According to Google Play, this version was released last month and was downloaded more than 500,000 times before it was deleted, which is a significant number, but it is still far from the more than 10 billion downloads of the official version of WhatsApp.

Although the fake version of WhatsApp appeared to appear as an ad result in some users' searches, this was not the case for all users. For example, when searching for the term "WhatsApp" on Google Play, both on mobile and on the web, the first result for some people was still the official version of this messenger.

It seems that the "WhatsApp" application has taken advantage of the early access program (Early Access) of Google Play. The Early Access program disables the ability to record public user comments about apps. This can make it more difficult for users to identify fake versions of real apps.

The strange thing is that this fake application was able to pass the security mechanisms of Google Play for more than a month and still remain in this store. It seems that this app has now been removed from the Google Store.