22 ‘criminal’ Android apps draining your battery

Researchers have revealed the “criminal” Android apps draining your smartphone’s battery life and your wallet.

Android phone owners are being warned about 22 dodgy apps that drain your battery life — and could land you with a big phone bill.

The “clickfraud” apps pretend to be normal apps on the Google Play Store but secretly perform criminal actions out of sight.

Experts at security firm Sophos found 22 such apps, which had been collectively downloaded more than 22 million times.

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The dodgy apps appear to have perfectly normal functionality but are actually ‘criminal’ according to researchers.

This includes one illicit flashlight app that racked up one million downloads — before being yanked from Google’s Play Store.

The apps create invisible ads and trick advertisers into thinking users are clicking on them.

One dodgy flashlight app had more than a million downloads.

The ads never actually appear for the user — which means they’re not annoyed by them.

Instead, the ads appear in a hidden browser window.

The malware then simulates a user interacting with the ad, tricking it into thinking the interaction is legitimate.

The apps contained a fraudulent code that tricked advertisers into handing over cash.

It’s also bad news for users, as researchers explain: “From the user’s perspective, these apps drain their phone’s battery and may cause data overawes as the apps are constantly running and communicating with servers in the background.”

But for normal users without technical knowledge, it would be very hard to spot something was amiss.

Warning signs would be increased data usage and fast-draining battery life — but pinning those to the dodgy apps would be hard.

This creates another big problem: user reviews.

Many of the apps had barely any negative comments because users don’t know anything is amiss. This means more people are likely to download the apps in future.

“The only effects a user might notice is that the apps would use a significantly greater amount of data, at all times, and consume the phone’s battery power at a more rapid rate than the phone would otherwise require,” researchers explained.

“Because consumers would not be able to correlate these effects to the apps themselves, their Play Market reviews for these apps showed few negative comments.”

Reviews for the apps were positive because users didn’t know what was happening behind the scenes.

Google removed the dodgy apps from the Play Store on the week of November 25.

But the apps can still operate if you’ve already got them installed, so we recommend deleting them now.

This isn’t the first time dodgy Android apps have been revealed to be dodgy.

In November, The Sun reported on dangerous apps that could steal your bank info and send fake texts.

And that same month, light was shed on 35 fake security apps in the Google Play Store.

This article originally appeared on The Sun and was reproduced with permission

Originally published as 22 ‘criminal’ Android apps draining your battery