Android app fined $79,000 for sneaky charges

Russian app developer Connect Ltd. has been fined £50,000, or about $79,000, by UK regulator Phonepay Plus, Digital Spy reported. Customers downloaded the Android application for games. But after the games were installed, the sneaky app sent a text message from the users' phones without warning. The text cost each user £10.

Connect Ltd, which trades as SMSBill, gives little indication of these charges. It only says in its terms and conditions that "charges of about £5" are incurred to phone users after they install the app, according to the Daily Telegraph. 

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However, even those weak warnings were buried on page 6 of the terms. "You have to read the small print and people never do," a senior technology consultant at Sophos told BBC News. "They were sneaky with the wording."

And a video posted on Naked Security shows how the malware automatically gets downloaded onto a user's Android phone.