‘Manufacturer Alcatel phones secretly registered customers with payment service’

TCL, the manufacturer of BlackBerry and Alcatel phones, has tried to secretly register customers with a payment service with its Weather app, a British security company reports. The Weather app also committed click fraud. The app still collects all kinds of data from users.

The fraud has since been stopped following a report by the British security company Upstream Systems and the business newspaper The Wall Street Journal, the newspaper writes. That happened through an update in November. However, the app still collects email addresses, imei numbers and geographic data from users and sends it to a server in China.

The weather app in question, Weather Forecast, comes preinstalled on Alcatel phones. It’s not on BlackBerrys. TCL releases phones under both brand names, but the BlackBerry phone software comes from Canadian company BlackBerry. Users of other Android phones can also download the app. Including TCL’s own models, the number of installations in the Play Store is above ten million.

The app secretly registered customers and users with a paid VR service in July and August, after which they started paying. The app also opened web pages in the background, with the app automatically clicking buttons to commit click fraud. Users found out because the battery drained faster, reports Upstream Systems. This happened in a total of seven countries.

TCL does not say anything about the data collection in a response. It says about the fraud that it will look at the security of its apps with consultants. It is not clear whether the fraud was the work of a single employee or whether it is the policy of the company.