App Developer Settles FTC and New Jersey Charges It Hijacked Consumers’ Phones to Mine Cryptocurrency

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A smartphone app developer has agreed to settle charges by the Federal Trade Commission and the New Jersey Attorney General that it lured consumers into downloading its “rewards” app, saying it would be free of malware, when the app’s main purpose was actually to load the consumers’ mobile phones with malicious software to mine virtual currencies for the developer. The Ohio-based defendants behind the app, called “Prized,” agreed to a settlement that will permanently ban them from creating and distributing malicious software. The settlement also includes a $50,000 monetary judgment against the defendants payable to the state of New Jersey, of which $44,800 is suspended upon payment of $5,200 and compliance with the injunctive provisions of the stipulated order.

The defendants, Equiliv Investments and Ryan Ramminger, began marketing the Prized app around February 2014, making it available in the Google Play Store, Amazon App Store and others. Thousands of consumers downloaded the app believing they could earn points for playing games or downloading affiliated apps and then spend those points on rewards such as clothes, gift cards and other items. Consumers were promised that the downloaded app would be free from malicious software -- malware -- or viruses, according to the complaint. What consumers got instead, according to the complaint, was an app that contained malware that took control of the device’s computing resources to “mine” for virtual currencies like DogeCoin, LiteCoin and QuarkCoin.


App Developer Settles FTC and New Jersey Charges It Hijacked Consumers’ Phones to Mine Cryptocurrency What’s yours is mined (FTC blog)