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Beware fake BBM apps in Android Play store

So BMM for Android didn’t launch yesterday as planned. A last minute technical something-or-other meant that BlackBerry made it available from www.bbm.com, then switched it off and removed it almost instantly. The iOS version still works, but if you don’t have it yet, you can’t download it until the problems are solved. Which reading between the lines means there was some show-stopping bug that appeared on a popular handset that hadn’t cropped up in testing. It happens, we can be patient.

Only we weren’t. Before I’d put my glasses on this morning so I could actually see my phone screen (that, believe it or not, is not a lie) I downloaded something that looked convincingly enough like the real thing from the Google Play store. When the first screen asked me to sideload another app which would ‘monetise’ my phone, I got rid of it quickly enough to avoid damage – but the warning is clear. There several fake BBM apps in Play right now, and you should avoid them all. They may charge you to stream YouTube How-to videos or download malicious code to your phone via a backdoor. Either way, they’re all created by scum-sucking bottom feeders who don’t have the right to touch a keyboard let alone produce working code.

That’s just opinion.

I wasn’t the only one to make this mistake either. Other readers who ‘should know better’ have already contacted us to say they did the same thing. And the point is that if the most-technically literate of us can fall for these scams – albeit briefly – just imagine the number of people who are using fake apps unwittingly. It’s the one area I wish Google would tighten its store policy – it’s one time when copyright laws should work in everyone’s favour by getting rid of apps that pass themselves off as something else.

This Tweet says it best:

 

We’ll update when the real app is out there, in the meantime – go have a slap up breakfast somewhere with your mates, and organise it with WhatsApp.

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