Editor TLN
1 May. (Portaltic/EP) –
The MacOS App Store has a problem with rogue apps that pretend to offer artificial intelligence services from the company OpenAI, whose makers also abuse the review system to get favorable reviews.
Applications that pretend to be the chatGPT ‘chatbot’ or use an OpenAI signature language model have proliferated in recent months, including in the MacOS store, where they promote services such as writing texts.
These applications replicate the AI signature logo or use names recognizable as OpenAI products, but as indicated on his blog cybersecurity analyst Alex Kleber, these are applications designed to deceive users, who pay for a program that promises a service that does not deliver.
Behind many of these fraudulent apps are Pixelsbay and ParallelWorld, two companies that Kleber says share the same address in Pakistan. Their applications even share 99 percent of the code and the same paywall style.
Suspecting that the fraudulent ‘apps’ are part of a broader campaign of sophisticated scams, the researcher has pointed out “the need for stricter regulation and monitoring in the MacOS application store to prevent such scams from proliferating and causing damage both users and legitimate developers.
Kleber has also denounced another practice that he has detected in relation to fraudulent applications that pretend to offer OpenAI services: abuse of the review system, whereby those responsible for said ‘apps’ would have obtained positive reviews.
Specifically, he suspects that they would have used an abusive technique by which the user is asked for a review immediately after subscribing to it, without giving them more time to test it, which also helps the ‘app’ to rise in the ranking of the store. .
This practice is contrary to the recommendations that Apple makes to the developers about the request for evaluation to the users.
