The alarm came a few days ago, directly from the pages of the New York Times and the New York Post. And the news is terrifying to all online shopping enthusiasts. In recent weeks, hundreds of “fake” and fraudulent apps have appeared on the Apple App Store, posing as shopping apps for smartphones and tablets. These virtual applications appear to be the genuine and official ones from a particular clothing brand (mainly sportswear and sneakers) or a chain of stores, but in reality, they only contain advertisements. Sometimes, however, they are created with a single and terrible objective: to steal credit card numbers or other sensitive personal information from users. In addition, they may contain ransomware, viruses that cause devices on which they are installed to be blocked and demand a ransom to unlock them.

Following the initial reports, Apple has started to remove this kind of apps, but blocking all of them is really challenging, as new ones are uploaded daily. Among the counterfeit apps reported by the New York Times, there are those from department store Nordstrom, e-commerce sites like Zappos, and luxury brands such as Jimmy Choo, Dior, and Salvatore Ferragamo. In addition to all those from the developer company Footlocke Sports Co. Ltd, which offered a total of 16 different apps for selling shoes and clothing, including Famous Footwear.

How to recognize them, then? Once downloaded, pay close attention to the options in their menus, which contain numerous grammatical errors in English. Or the lack of reviews from other users (essential!) who have downloaded them before. However, pay attention to the number of downloads for each app: some of these apps seem to have been downloaded thousands of times. But it’s unclear how many people have actually used them. And how.