Chinese smartphone maker selling devices with malware pre-installed
Pre-installed malware that signs mobile users up for subscription services without their permission has been discovered on thousands of low cost smartphones from the Chinese manufacturer Transsion.
The discovery was made by Upstream's anti-fraud platform Secure-D whose researchers conducted a full investigation into the origin of the suspicious transactions detected by its platform.
Beginning in March of last year, the firm discovered and blocked an unusually large number of transactions originating from Transsion Tecno W3 handsets in Ethiopia, Cameroon, Egypt, Ghana and South Africa with additional fraudulent mobile transactions detected in another 14 countries. To date, a total of 19.2m suspicious transactions, which would have secretly signed users up for subscription services without their permission, have been recorded from over 200k unique devices. Many of these blocked transactions were carried out by a family of apps called com.mufc whose source is unknown and cannot be downloaded from any Android app store.
