Apple Under Fire After Fake Trezor App Stole $600,000 in Bitcoin from One Victim

As the popularity of crypto has soared, so have the amount of scams that are stealing from unsuspecting users. 

This time, Apple is in the hotseat and has been accused of allowing a fake app called “Trezor” to mimic the well-known hardware wallet of the same name.

The scam app used the Trezor brand colors and logo to imitate the company and dupe users out of large sums of Bitcoin. 

He had searched on Apple’s App Store for a Trezor app so that he could easily check the balance of his 17.1 BTC, rather than logging in on his computer each time. 

Unfortunately for Phillipe, Trezor didn’t have a digital wallet, and the app he downloaded was a fake. Within a second of him typing in his details, almost $600,000 worth of Bitcoin was stolen. Today, his Bitcoin would have been worth close to $1 million. 

‘Five-Star App’ That Stole Hundreds of Thousands

The app, which was downloaded about 1,000 times and had 155 reviews with almost a five-star rating, is the reason that Phillippe is most angry. He told the newspaper:

“They betrayed the trust that I had in them, Apple doesn’t deserve to get away with this.”

The fake Trezor app managed to escape any red flags as the developer told Apple that “it is not involved in any cryptocurrency”  and was intended to encrypt iPhone files and store passwords. 

Once the app was approved and appeared on the App Store on January 22, it performed what Apple calls a “bait-and-switch” — enabling it to change to a “cryptocurrency wallet” and scam users out of digital assets.

While Apple has acknowledged that there have been other cryptocurrency scams on the App Store, Kristyna Mazankova, a spokesman for Trezor, said that they had been notifying Apple for years about fake apps posing as Trezor to scam its customers. 

She also claimed that representatives from Apple haven’t been in contact.

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