Millions of Android users could be at risk of losing their hard-earned cash, thanks to a series of dodgy phone apps.
11 popular apps have been identified which contain ‘subscription Trojans’.
In short, these apps can secretly sign up users to pricey monthly subscription plans and use these to quietly drain money from their bank accounts.
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Although they can no longer be downloaded from the Google Play Store, they could still be installed on countless Android phones which is why users are being urged to take action.
These apps have been downloaded an estimated 615,000 times, so you should check your phone and delete them if they’re present.
The apps include:
- Beauty Camera Plus
- Beauty Photo Camera
- Beauty Slimming Photo Editor
- Fingertip Graffiti
- GIF Camera Editor
- HD 4K Wallpaper
- Impressionism Pro Camera
- Microclip Video Editor
- Night Mode Camera Pro
- Photo Camera Editor
- Photo Effect Editor
To delete them, just tap and hold down on the app icons in question then tap ‘Uninstall’ in the popup window that appears.
The problem apps were identified by the cybersecurity experts at Kaspersky. Dmitry Kalinin said: “Affected users often fail to discover the unwanted subscriptions right away, let alone find out how they happened in the first place.
“All this makes subscription Trojans a reliable source of illegal income in the eyes of cybercriminals.”
He added: “Our data suggests that the Trojan has been active since 2022. We have found eleven… infected apps on Google Play, which have been installed on more than 620,000 devices.
“All of the apps had been removed from the marketplace by the time our report was published but the malicious actors might have deployed other, as yet undiscovered, apps, so the real number of installations could be higher.”
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