Trend Micro detects fake mining apps on Google Play? Along with the rapidly increasing quantity of people involved in crypto mining, the number of scammers in this industry is also growing. Cybercriminals place their pseudo-applications on Google Play, and Trend Micro, in turn, brings them to the surface. In a recent report, Trend Micro security experts highlighted 8 fake mobile apps they found in the Google digital store. The indicators used by the Trend Micro team are named AndroidOS_FakeMinerPay and AndroidOS_FakeMinerAd. They help identify fraudsters and promptly restrict users from downloading such programs to their smartphones. Among the eight programs of the developers who were caught in deception, two were, moreover, paid. For example, Crypto Holic offered to start cloud mining of Bitcoins for “only” $12.99, and the application with the allegedly cloud mining system Daily Bitcoin Rewards urged users to fork out $5.99 to access its functionality. Some of the fake mining apps have had over 100,000 downloads. More than 120 so-called mining applications are furthermore obtainable online, according to MARS, a division of Trend Micro. At the same time, all of them do not provide an opportunity to mine, but only force their users to watch dozens or even hundreds of commercials. An analysis of the activities of fraudulent programs showed that they all faked activity related to the extraction of cryptocurrencies in their internal interface using a local module that simulates the mining process. It included a false counter of mined tokens and performed several more random functions. In parallel with this, many applications offered their users one of the “generous offers” to increase revenue. Daily Bitcoin Rewards, for example, offered to acquire “extra hash rate” to speed up the mining of digital currencies. Other apps like Bitcoin (BTC) Pool Mining Cloud Wallet or Bitcoin 2021 asked customers to view a lot of promotional videos to improve the mining speed. Naturally, this was all a lie. At the same time, it was funny and sad that in the conditions of using one of the mobile applications, it identified itself as a game, warning that no one would be able to withdraw the earned tokens. We advise you to carefully study reviews (especially negative ones) about applications before downloading them to your device and do not believe in especially transcendental “bonuses” guaranteed by developers for your virtual activity in the form of viewing ads. Subscribe to our Telegram , Twitter and Facebook to be the first to know about cryptocurrency news!