Entrepreneur Kosta Eleftheriou has made it his life’s mission to expose scammy iOS apps, and his latest discovery is a doozie. He found a game called Jungle Run – actually a 2D coin game – that turns into a cryptocurrency-funded casino in Turkey.
The app is currently live Apple’s App Store and claims to be a ‘fun running game’. When you install it, you’ll see the app’s terms of service in what looks like a website window in the app. The terms are, unusually, stored on a Pastebin page that briefly appears and then disappears.
Once you start the app, you will be presented with a game that looks like it was created by a student:
Normal users would delete this app immediately. But there is a surprise if you appear to be in Turkey based on your IP address.
Instead of showing you the monkey game, an online casino will pop up asking you to fund your online wallet with cash and various cryptocurrencies. Baffled by this, I decided to try it myself. I downloaded the game and tried it in the US. As expected, the terrible monkey game came. I then changed my location via VPN with Proton VPN, and voilà, there’s a roulette wheel and a request to go through Apple’s in-app purchase system and fund a nebulous casino wallet.
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“Alternative App Stores that focus more on security than revenue would do much better than Apple,” said Eleftheriou. “The iPhone already has enough system-level protection for this to work, and Apple needs to drop the security theater that hurts consumers every day.”
The app’s creator, Colin Malachi, was impossible to find online, but Eleftheriou said the scam has been going on for months. The app itself has no reviews and was last updated on January 23, 2021, presumably to add the janky terms of service screen.
Here’s a video of the app running before setting the IP address to Turkey and beyond.
The app is still live from this point on.
“To top it all off, people say in the reviews that they deposited large sums of money for the bonus promise, but never received the promised payouts. No one is surprised, the scammers don’t even run a fair casino, ”said Eleftheriou.
We asked Apple for comment, but it’s best to avoid this app, especially if you’re in Turkey.