These apps lure people into buying lottery tickets online. Criminals use referral links to spread their campaign. To prove legitimacy, they masquerade as government entities and create fake advertisements from accounts having 200K+ followers on major social media platforms. They buy domains which act as payment gateway, and allow hackers to accept payments from major UPI apps. These apps are: Upibank.com, Upibank.in, indiacashpayment.com, Ybbpay.net and Sliderummy.in.
How these apps cheat Android users
Based on reviews posted on Google Play Store, after successful installation of the lottery app from the Play Store, it prompts users to install a secondary self-hosted APK file. It was found that both the apps ‘Kerala Lottery Online’ and ‘India Kerala Lottery’ display the same privacy policy but operate under different names. Upon analysis of these two apps, the following email addresses were listed as developers contact: [email protected] and [email protected].
The apps also ask for several permissions and notable among these was the request to install packages (Required to install other applications on your device). Cybercriminals have used a referral program to spread their apps. There were multiple Telegram groups, YouTube videos, Facebook and Twitter posts promoting the scam apps. Logos of Directorate of Kerala State Lotteries and National Informatics Centre, Kerala State logo and India were used. Fake profiles on Facebook, using photos of Hollywood actors too have been created and used to advertise the app.
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