Heads up - Kids and grands playing online games and downloading apps

[sumi]

My DS plays online games on my phone and occasionally looks for "hacks" for his games too. Neither of which have been a problem so far. Until two days when he did two things: He searched for "Pixel Survival (game) Hacks" and downloaded the Fidget Spinner app. My money is on the latter, but I'm listing both here as we're unsure where the problem originated from. Shortly after downloading the app and doing a google search for the hacks mentioned above, we found that every time I unlock my phone screen, it opens a website where you can subscribe to receive content of an adult nature. I googled the site and found it got connected to other random websites as well (including a site on breast-feeding), some people reporting that it sends them text messages and emails and charging them for these. So there is clearly a hack somewhere on either the app he downloaded, or in the google search results.

I went digging and found an "unnamed" app on my phone, which I have been unable to delete and I had to reset my phone to factory settings to get rid of this, which I am NOT happy about.

Note: I did check his browsing history and app downloads, as I do daily, and he didn't go looking for content of this nature. It got onto my phone through the backdoor.

So just wanted to warn everyone here with kids and grandchildren that plays games online. The games themselves as I said haven't given us anything to worry about, but somewhere between the hack search for above mentioned game and the fidget app, there is a loophole for this "service". Please put word out as well.

 

[frustratedearthmother]

that's horrible! Glad you got it figured out and were finally able to get rid of it - but geeze - it's a darn shame that you had to deal with it at all!

 

[sumi]

FEM, and how? I was so mad this morning! One thing I am happy about is DS didn't go digging in there to see what they're offering. When I asked him about it he thought it was a supermarket promotion Bless him, he thought it was an advert, like they show on TV and just skipped past it to get to his games.