Apple approved another secret gambling den, masquerading as a puzzle game

This morning I wrote how Apple’s $ 64 billion a year App Store doesn’t catch an incredibly obvious multi-million dollar scam because the company doesn’t even bother checking its most profitable apps for fraud, and how app developer Kosta Eleftheriou shows this the company how it should be done.

But that’s not the only kind of scam Eleftheriou has uncovered in Apple’s App Store – he has also found that Apple’s review teams approve games that turn into secret gambling holes when you access them from certain countries (or via VPN). We wrote about two of them last Thursday as if it were an isolated incident, but he has now found at least two more, suggesting this may be a trend – including a match-three puzzle game called Lucky Stars that turns into a casino when you open it in Russia, and called a game Vegas Pirates it does the same.

In some ways they’re even more egregious examples: While it might be more shocking that a monkey collecting banana game for kids would turn into a gambling den, these new apps seem to be demanding extra attention with their gambling-focused visuals and the fact that they did as if a Russian news organization was their ‘developer website’.

They are both gone now.

If you’re looking for a shock value, Eleftheriou recently saw this unrelated app as well:

Apple is testifying before Congress today – and next month in an incredibly high-profile lawsuit against Epic Games – about how the App Store protects users, justifies the traditional 30 percent cut (reportedly $ 64 billion last year alone), and it shouldn’t it will be broken up. Discoveries like this provide the company’s critics with a lot of ammunition.