During the days amid the 'COVID-19' coronavirus, people are spending more of their times at home and away from school and office.
Using VPNs, users can keep their data and their browsing habit completely private from their internet service provider and the government, or any from third-party snoops. For users in Indonesia for example, they can use a VPN to access sites that aren't allowed by the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology.
During the coronavirus pandemic, many VPN providers are certainly benefiting from this trend.
And here, three VPNs for iOS were found to do more (and less) than what they're supposed to do, posing risks to users.
According to a report from the researchers at Avast, three iOS VPN apps all with high ratings scores of 4.7 to 4.8, were found to “overcharge users, do not provide the services they promote and appear to be 'fleeceware.’ ”
Coming with expensive subscriptions attached, the Avast researchers said that three apps in the Apple App Store were Beetle VPN, Buckler VPN and Hat VPN Pro.
Related: Researchers Discovered 32 IOS 'Fleeceware' Taking Advantage Of Careless Users
Nikolaos Chrysaidos, Avast's head of Mobile Threats and Security, said that:
The three apps are free to download, have similar features, structures and privacy policies, and required users to opt in to in-app purchase.
After a three-day trial, users are charged $9.99 every week following a three-day free trial. That translates to just over $519 a year.
In comparison, some trustworthy VPNs can cost ten times less.
The steep price however, is not the worst yet.
The Avast researchers found that when they purchased a subscription and attempted to use the VPN, they were presented with prompts inviting them to buy access.
But because they already had paid for a subscription, the app then showed an error message reminding them that they had a subscription already and were therefore unable to complete a connection to the VPN.
What this means, not only that the three apps offer exorbitant price for a VPN service once their free-trial periods expired, they are also literally unusable.
According to data from Sensor Tower, a mobile apps marketing intelligence and insights company, the apps have been downloaded a lot. One had over 420,000 downloads, another, 271,000, and the third 96,000 downloads between April 2019 and May 2020.
Expensive and unusable, the researchers suggested that the overwhelmingly positive reviews may be fakes, considering that many of the comments they received were written similarly and are all suspiciously overenthusiastic.
“These apps are not behaving maliciously so they circumvent screening processes to be added to the official app stores’ that users trust,”Chrysaidos said.
Users can recognize fleeceware apps using a number of ways.
First, fleeceware apps can come in any category, but tend to look fake, as they have multiple users leaving a review like “Exciting” or “My love”. Usually, apps have mixed reviews. Second, fleeceware apps typically offer a free three to seven day trial, but can require users to enter their payment information before the trial begins.
VPNs are designed to win people's trust and offer a safe haven, because after all, users traffic will pass through them. A dodgy VPN undoes all of that.