In popular culture, breaking into illegal gambling establishments is as easy as walking into the right store and saying the code, or cheering for some clapping. Apple’s App Store clearly has a practical meaning: today, application developer Kosta Eleftheriou has discovered a terrible game for children, which is actually at the forefront of gambling sites.

The secret password isn’t something you can guess – it must be in the right country (or use a VPN to pretend you’re in the right country).

But then, instead of publishing the ugly, reversible monkey endless runner game full of typos and mistakes, the app released a casino experience:

The application “Jungle Runner 2k21” has disappeared from the App Store, probably due to the promotion of Gizmodo and Daring Fireball, who wrote information about the discovery of Eleftheriou.

However, this is not the only game: the same developer “Colin Malachi” has another very good base game on the App Store called “Magic Forest-Puzzle”, which is also The Frontier of the game. Tried them myself, here are some visual tests:

I accessed them from a VPN server in Turkey; Although Daring Fireball pointed out that users from other non-US countries (such as Italy) seem to be able to access gambling sites, I tested the game in many other places, including Italy. But they all failed.

Unlike the multi-million dollar App Store scams that Eleftheriou discovered earlier this year, it’s not hard to see why Apple’s App Store review process can bypass these scams – if you don’t know the trick, largely As far as it is concerned, it appears that this is a typical spade software. , nothing else. Some things to tell us … for example, the fact that Jungle Runner uses Pastebin to develop its privacy policy:

It’s not always clear to me if they also violated many of Apple’s App Store policies. Apple allows the use of gambling applications, as long as they geographically restrict the areas where gambling is permitted by law, you may be able to show that this is exactly what the developer did by verifying your IP address. But I think Cupertino will scowl somehow disguised as a gambling app for children’s games. Eleftheriou said that gambling sites can also make people lose money.