Apple has apparently allowed a large number of applications into the Brazilian iOS App Store that secretly offered access to gambling platforms that were actually banned under Apple’s rules. This was found out by the US Apple blog 9to5Mac. According to the report, there are more than 60 applications that still made it through Apple’s app review. The apps reacted to the IP address of the person who accessed them: if the person was of Brazilian origin, betting platforms appeared instead of the application described.
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Also approved for children
According to 9to5Mac, Apple has now deleted all identified applications from the iOS App Store, although new ones have now appeared. They even made it into the top 200 most downloaded free applications. All apps were also approved for the “AL” age group, meaning that they also appeared in children. Some of the affected apps have comments written by users warning of a “scam”.
According to the report, the apps were distributed across numerous popular categories such as travel, navigation and weather. They present themselves as games, which does not fit into the category. AI-generated icons of animals can be seen. Most apps come from developers who currently only have a single application in the App Store, which should have made Apple suspicious. The developer names often appear to be Vietnamese.
Apple: Stop billion-dollar fraud
Apparently the developers help each other. 9to5Mac discovered a repository on GitHub that contains detailed instructions on how to use Cursor’s AI agents to develop corresponding apps via Vibe Coding in order to then point them to betting platforms. The Brazilian government recently asked Apple to comment on illegal gambling programs in the App Store, and a similar request was also made to Google and its Play Store, where there are apparently similar problems.
Apple always emphasizes how rigorous its app review process is. Billions of dollars in fraud have been stopped. However, it often happens that problematic programs slip through. Tricks like displaying different content depending on the IP origin have been known to the iPhone company for years – so it should actually be able to recognize them.
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