A lawsuit alleges a counterfeit “Sparrow Wallet” app was allowed to remain in Apple’s App Store for months, leading investors to lose about $1.8M in Bitcoin. Victims reportedly entered their wallet “seed phrases” into the fake app, letting the scammer take over their funds. The case is a reminder for organisations that app-store approval and other “curated” marketplaces reduce risk but do not replace internal due diligence.
Mirage safely runs attacks like this one against your own team, so you find out what happens before a real adversary does.
A fake Sparrow Wallet app sat in Apple’s App Store for months… and people lost about $1.8 million in Bitcoin. Here’s the trick: a counterfeit version of Sparrow Wallet, which has never had an official iOS release, asked users to enter their wallet seed phrase, then drained their coins. Aha moment: platform approval is not a security control. Apple had been warned about copycat Sparrow Wallet listings as early as January 2024, and the fake app still stayed up. Your move: if any app asks for a wallet seed phrase or recovery code, stop and independently verify the publisher and official release channel before anyone types a single word.
Check Point reports that scammers are now impersonating ChatGPT/OpenAI in phishing campaigns, reflecting how mainstream the service has become. One documented example used a fake “ChatGPT Plus payment failure” notice that sent victims to a fraudulent payment page designed to capture full credit…
A scam campaign uses full-screen browser popups impersonating Apple Support or Amazon to claim an “unauthorized” $149.99 charge and pressure victims to call a phone number. Callers reach a live scammer posing as support who tries to gain remote access or steal payment/account details, sometimes…
Microsoft tracked a real macOS ClickFix campaign using 250+ domains that fingerprint visitors to hide malicious pages from security scanners. Selected Mac users are shown a fake “Download for macOS” lure and prompted to copy/paste an obfuscated command into Terminal, which then pulls down scripts…
Microsoft Threat Intelligence tracked a real macOS “ClickFix” campaign that uses look‑alike domains to trick Mac users into copying and running a Terminal command. The operation now hides the malicious “Download for macOS” lure behind server-side browser fingerprinting, showing benign decoy pages…
Three crypto investors sued Apple after allegedly losing about $1.8 million in Bitcoin to an iPhone app that impersonated the legitimate (desktop-only) Sparrow Wallet. The victims trusted the app because it was available in the App Store, then entered their wallet “seed phrase” into the counterfeit…
This weekly roundup describes multiple real-world campaigns where attackers trick people using familiar brands and “verification” prompts to steal credentials or install remote-control tools. The common theme is trust abuse: messages and web pages look legitimate, then push users to log in, click…
