The macOS App Store has a problem with rogue apps pretending to offer artificial intelligence services from the company OpenAI, whose creators also abuse the review system to get favorable reviews.
Applications pretending to be ChatGPT ‘chatbots’ or using the OpenAI signature language model have proliferated in recent months, including in the MacOS Store, where they promote services such as typing text.
These apps repeat the AI firm’s logo or use names identified as OpenAI products, but as cybersecurity analyst Alex Kleber points out on his blog, these are apps that trick users into signing up for a program. Payments are designed to promise a service that does not deliver.
Pixelsbay and ParallelWorld are behind many of these fraudulent apps, two companies that Kleber says share the same address in Pakistan. Their apps also share 99 percent of the code and the same paywall style.
Suspecting that the fraudulent ‘apps’ are part of a wider campaign of sophisticated scams, the researcher called for “tighter regulation and stricter regulation in the macOS Application Store to prevent such scams from proliferating and harming both users and legitimate developers.” monitoring is needed.
Kleber also denounces another practice he has found with regard to fraudulent applications that pretend to offer OpenAI services: abuse of the review system, whereby those responsible for said ‘apps’ will receive positive reviews .
In particular, they suspect that they may have used an abusive technique by which the user is asked for a review immediately after subscribing to it, without giving them much time to test it, which could affect the ranking of the ‘app’. It also helps in increasing Shop. ,
This practice is contrary to the recommendations that Apple makes to developers when it requests user feedback.
