Google And Apple Removed Over 330 Apps From Their Online Stores :
The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) said Tuesday that the two technology giants removed over 330 financial trading apps from their app stores following a review.
The regulator discovered that unlicensed individuals were operating the apps, which focused on binary trading. In binary trading, people predict whether the price of a given option will go up or down in a short amount of time, and then buy or sell based on their predictions. According to the ASIC’s website, this form of high risk, speculative trading is relatively new to Australia.
After reviewing the apps, the regulator also discovered that the owners failed to disclose the risky nature of the trading practice and instead made it appear that people could get rich quickly by using their apps. Some of the apps contained marketing messages that bragged that people could “Earn up to 90% in less than an hour, in fact you can profit quickly as 60 seconds and profit as much as 620% via one trade.”
About 80% of the apps the regulator singled out did not warn of any risks. Some were “merely collecting personal information which could be used for high-pressure cold calling.”
