An unofficial app for the popular MyEtherWallet.com service is being sold for $4.99 in Apple’s iOS App Store. The week-old MyEtherWallet digital wallet app, which is misleadingly named at best, or a scam at worst, rose to the third most popular ranking in the paid finance category over the weekend, where it still resides at the time of publication. The app’s developer is listed as Nam Le, who has no relation to the service and no history with bitcoin (Le’s other apps include a panda warrior game and a fishing game). MyEtherWallet.com is one of the most popular services for storing cryptocurrencies, but it doesn’t have an official app in Apple’s App Store.
A digital wallet is comprised of a public address where money can be sent, and a private key known only by the owner. Le’s app claims to store keys encrypted locally on your device, but turning over your bitcoin to an unknown wallet developer with a purposely misleading name is a risky proposition to say the least.
MyEtherWallet tweeted that it had filed a report with Apple against the app, saying “This is NOT US.”
Bitcoin surged past $15,000 last week and is currently at $16,559, pushed upwards today as futures contracts for the cryptocurrency began trading. Bitcoin’s price is extremely volatile, and has surged 1,600 percent since the beginning of the year. Coinbase, an app that lets users buy cryptocurrency, became the number one downloaded app on the App Store last week.
Source: techcrunch