Edit: There’s a short follow-up to this post: Exodus Bitcoin Wallet: Follow up. tl;dr: A Bitcoin investor was recently scammed out of 9 Bitcoin (worth around $490K) in a fake “Exodus wallet” desktop application for Linux, published in the Canonical Snap Store. This isn’t the first time, and if nothing changes, it likely won’t be the last. This post turned out longer than I expected. So if you don’t have the time there’s a briefer summary at the bottom under “In summary (the tl;dr)” along with my suggestions on what Canonical should do now.

I am not a member of the Anti-Snap crowd (although of course the server sources should be open source), but there is obviously a lot to improve. Flathub/Flatpak should also take note!

  • ShittyBeatlesFCPres@lemmy.worldEnglish
    21·
    9 months ago

    I like the recommendations but I would also just ban cryptocurrency wallets from the app stores (and traditional finance apps capable of transferring funds electronically). There’s not much you can do to stop scams in that space but if the devs distribute their own apps, at least the user can verify they’re at the original developer’s site or repo or whatever and possibly hold them accountable.

    That probably won’t help on the scams — people in the crypto world get scammed more than aging grandparents, it seems. But I don’t want Canonical or Flathub to be held liable due to a lack of moderation resources. If they can ever automate moderation to the degree it’s safe, bring back the finance app category with some safeguards.