XRP holders sue Apple for listing apps that lose their money

By Selena On Sep 17, 2021

Recently, XRP Army announced a lawsuit against Apple, the biggest company globally, accusing them of being responsible for listing the fake app of Toast Plus.

XRP holders file a class-action lawsuit against Apple

Apple has been sued by a group of disgruntled XRP owners who claim to have lost their funds to a fraudulent app. In it, cybersecurity IT professional Hadona Diep, representing XRP holders whose wallets have been emptied out by a fake app want to hold Apple accountable, filed the lawsuit in Federal District Court in Maryland on September 16.

The story revolves around a cryptocurrency wallet called Toast Plus that is listed on the App Store. This is a version scam of Toast Wallet, and Apple is responsible for licensing the malicious app in the App Store and not removing it.

Diep said she downloaded the app in March 2020 onto her iPhone and was fooled into thinking it was real. However, she later noticed something was wrong and since it appeared to be just a version of Toast Wallet due to its nearly identical logo.

“Plaintiff believed that Toast Plus was a version of Toast Wallet, a well-known cryptocurrency wallet, as the names were similar and the logo used for the application in the App Store was the same or nearly identical,” the filing stated.

Before using this fake “Toast Plus” app, Diep initially used Rippex, a popular XRP desktop wallet, to store her tokens before the project shut down in January 2018. In March of this year, she transferred her holdings to the Toast Plus app and later discovered that her XRP was gone, and her account was deleted in August. And after realizing that she was the victim, she lost $5,000.

Not only Diep, but in early 2021, members of the r/XRP Reddit community started complaining that the Toast Wallet was indeed compromised despite appearing high in search results. Some users whose accounts were cleaned up by the scammers described the situation as “depressing.”

Source: Reddit

Apple has a strict app testing process. Due to the locked-down ecosystem, the company has complete control over placing applications on the “monopolistic” App Store. Therefore, this makes users suspect that Apple’s censorship process is not as strict as they claim. Diep demanded that Apple compensate her and every other member for negligence during the moderation process in light of this incident.

Toast Plus isn’t Apple’s first incident. In 2019, security firm Wandera discovered 17 malicious apps in the App Store. Some estimate that around 2% of the top apps on the platform could be classified as a scam. Apple’s 500-person app review team may not be able to guarantee an adequate level of user protection.

Read more: