14 DAY TRIAL // Apple and Google have started the fight against risky trading apps that were published in their stores, with the two companies removing some 300 such items at the request of the Australian Securities and Investments Commission.
Australia’s securities watchdog says it contacted the two companies after it discovered a growing number of apps requiring customers to bet on whether instruments like shares or currencies will rise or fall, a report by Bloomberg reveals, and the country received complaints following cases of fraud and involving unlicensed operators.
According to ASIC, a review of the apps in the two stores discovered that more than 330 apps were offered by operators that were not licensed, including misleading information about trading profitability, and did not outline the risk of trading binary options.
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“ASIC contacted Apple and Google about the apps that were the subject of this surveillance. We were encouraged with the speed both entities removed the relevant apps identified by ASIC from their respective app stores. We also note that Apple recently changed its review guidelines to state that apps that facilitate binary options trading will not be permitted in its app store,” the regulator said in a statement.
Apple has also updated its App Store Review Guidelines to state that “apps that facilitate binary options trading are not permitted on the App Store and [users should] consider a web app instead.”
ASIC said most of the apps that were placed on the banned list included descriptions that promoted a fake amount of profit that could be made, such as “Earn up to 90 percent in less than an hour, in fact you can profit quickly as 60 seconds and profit as much as 620 percent via one trade.” These descriptions were fake, the organization notes and no less than 80 percent of them had no risk warning at all.
On the other hand, MacRumors writes that despite the en-masse removal, there still are plenty of similar apps in the App Store, which could be an indication that Apple only banned the apps highlighted by ASIC, without running a review on other similar apps.