Google slaps Chinese developers with lawsuit in New York for conducting ‘pig-butchering’ scams via its Play Store
- Google accused Yunfeng Sun in Shenzhen and Hongnam Cheung in Hong Kong of defrauding about 100,000 users through fake cryptocurrency investment apps
- The tech giant said the two individuals uploaded 87 bogus apps on the Google Play Store to target users in the US and Canada
The fraudsters’ scheme also involved initially developing a friendship or romantic relationship with the victims, and then persuading them to make investments through the apps they operate, the lawsuit said.
The fraudulent apps ran by the two Chinese developers “affected consumers across the globe” and resulted in “substantial financial losses” to Google users, the US tech giant said in its lawsuit.
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While Google had made efforts to remove those apps, the company said the two defendants managed to create more apps using “new aliases and infrastructure”, and by making “repeated material misrepresentations” regarding their identity and activities.
Google’s lawsuit shows the continued rise of pig-butchering scams around the world, which have duped tens of thousands of victims into making fraudulent investments online.