Don't be fooled! Bitdefender Anti-Prank Tool Does Not Exist

If you’ve been fooled by this app, be cautious! Our innocent app is meant to put a smile on your face, but thousands of rogue apps put your identity and online safety at risk. Scammers mean business when it comes to stealing your credit card number, passwords or installing malware on your devices, and they take advantage of your favorite apps to do so.

Replicas of famous apps have recently fooled thousands of unsuspecting users.

The highly downloaded Flappy Bird mobile game was cloned to steal user photos from Android phones. “I have developed a flappybird clone. Hear me out. I.. modded.. the app. It now secretly downloads all of the phones pictures to my server when the game is running,” the scammer boasted.

Others have flooded online marketplaces with fake copies of reputable antivirus solutions for mobile devices.

An illegitimate paid antivirus solution called Virus Shield fooled 10,000 people who downloaded it after spotting it retailing at $3.99 in the Android marketplace. 1,700 people awarded the app with a 4.7 star rating. This translates to $40,000 in gains for the developer of the application, Deviant Solutions, a known scammer previously accused of trying to trick people on forums.

A fake Bitdefender antivirus download was posted on YouTube to lead users to fraudulent surveys and premium SMS scams. The video had hundreds of views and several French users posted messages to warn others.

Online scammers also use rogue Facebook applications to drive traffic to revenue-generating survey scams. Lured by a Facebook message from a friend that promises to show a shocking picture or video, users allow a rogue app to access all their data and post messages on their behalf, including malicious ones.

If you’ve been hit by a scam like this, remove it from your News Feed, revoke the right to access your profile through “Account/Privacy Settings/Applications and Websites” and edit your profile to remove any unauthorized pages from your Likes and Interests.

Don’t forget to download apps only from reputable sites! Pirated apps can be repackaged and injected with malicious code that can hide keyloggers and other software designed to steal credentials or sensitive banking information. And last, but not least, use an efficient mobile security solution to analyze potentially malicious apps and block them before they do any damage.

Happy April Fools Day!