VietNamNet Bridge - ‘Mobile protection: Clean & Security VPN’, an app of top 20 in earning growth on App Store developed by ‘Ngan Vo Thi Thuy’ has been found by medium.freecodecamp.com of tricking users out for $80,000 a month, or more than VND1 billion. 

The article by Johnny Lin published on June 9 on the website described in detail how ‘Mobile protection: Clean & Security VPN’ defrauds users of money.

The author, surprised by the news that Apple has paid $70 billion to developers, with 30 percent of that ($21 billion!) in the last year, decided that he had to find out where these revenues were coming from.

He found that even if it's a useless app, it costs $99.99 for a one-week subscription if users easily fill out the information. This app is full of ads.

The author easily discovered why the app quickly became the most wanted app within two months. 

“Scammers are abusing Apple’s relatively new and immature App Store Search Ads product. They’re taking advantage of the fact that there’s no filtering or approval process for ads, and that ads look almost indistinguishable from real results, and some ads take up the entire search result’s first page,” he wrote.

An app of this kind now has similar names in order to earn as much money as possible from users.

He discovered that ‘Protection for iPhone  - Mobile Security VPN’ by Nguyen Thai, which is something similar to a swindling app, also has the price of $99.99 for one-week registration and it ranked 33rd in earnings.

The article has become a hot topic of discussion on Vietnamese developers’ forums. 

Similar examples and swindlers have been exposed. These include ‘ACR Recording App - Auto Call Recorder For iPhone’ by Phan Xuan Hien and Auto Call Recorder - Record Phone Calls Auto by Le Loc.

Some Vietnamese developers are angry about cheating, saying ‘one rotten apple spoils the barrel’. They fear that the image of Vietnamese developers will get worse in the eyes of the international developers’ community. 

The biggest concern of Vietnamese developers is that Google and Apple may deal with developers from Vietnam with heavy hands. 

“There is a high possibility that Apple and Google would deal with Vietnamese apps with heavy hands,” said Tran Viet Hung, the founder of GotIt, adding that Apple and Google may apply strict provisions for the Vietnamese developers who want to put their apps on App Store or Google Play.

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