Many are cheering the arrest this week of Hammad Akbar, a 31-year-old Pakistani man who made the mistake of traveling to Los Angeles, where U.S. law enforcement welcomed him by slapping handcuffs on him. Akbar is the CEO of a Lahore-based company that makes a spyware app called StealthGenie. Its sketchy website, hosted in Virginia by Amazon Web Services, was taken down by the FBI with a temporary restraining order; its cached version shows that it promised customers they could "start spying on any phone within the next 5 minutes." Once installed on a jailbroken iPhone or rooted Android, which the installer needed to get his or her hands on for 5-10 minutes, the app would report everything the phone did -- calls, texts, videos, web browsing -- to the snoopy installer via a Web portal. Even better, StealthGenie bragged, it could turn the phone into a real-time bug, "recording the surroundings of the target phone at any time you want," up to a 15-foot radius.
The app's website advertised its use for monitoring "employees and loved ones such as children," but according to the FBI, Akbar and his team developed an internal business plan that revealed that -- duh -- the primary target audience for the app was people who thought their partners were cheating. The StealthGenie bust started way back in December 2012, when an FBI undercover agent bought the app and then used it to spy on an Android smartphone, collecting video and audio from the device. Akbar is now charged with selling and advertising wiretapping equipment. "StealthGenie has little use beyond invading a victim’s privacy,” said U.S. Attorney Dana Boente in a press release about the indictment. “Advertising and selling spyware technology is a criminal offense, and such conduct will be aggressively pursued by this office and our law enforcement partners.”
Well, they've got a long list of other apps to go after. StealthGenie is far from the only one offering this service. There's MobileSpy, MSpy, FlexiSPY, and MobiStealth to name a few. The rates vary from $20 for two weeks to $350 for a year, depending on how invasive you'd like the monitoring to be. Like StealthGenie, most of these companies pretend their apps exist for the relatively-legal-if-they-know-it-is-happening purpose of spying on employees, and the legal-because-kids-have-no-rights purpose of monitoring children. But at least one is explicit about what it hopes to help people do. FlexiSPY, made by Thailand-based Vervata, explicitly states on its front page that it exists to "catch cheaters." "All men are biologically prone to cheating – including your husband or boyfriend," the site explains sympathetically. And even though women are "genetically" disinclined to cheat, FlexiSPY encourages the use of its product on ladies because "women are better at lying than men."
Hilariously, FlexiSPY, just like StealthGenie, has a disingenuous legal disclaimer at the bottom of its page: "It is the responsibility of the FlexiSPY user to ascertain, and obey all applicable laws in their country in regard to the use of FlexiSPY for 'sneaky purposes'." When one woman turned up in FlexiSPY's user forums complaining that her husband used the app, among other techniques, to monitor her for two years, a FlexiSPY support agent responded, "Thanks for bringing this to our attention and sharing your experiences." (The next time Vervata's CEO travels to the U.S., he may find a law enforcement welcoming party waiting for him.)
The sketchy services on offer from FlexiSPY
Many of the companies are cagey about where they are based, but not all are outside of the U.S. MobileSpy, from Jacksonville, Florida-based Retina-X Studios, offers the exact same spying software as the others, including the disturbing "record surroundings" offering, though it continues the farce of saying it's for "viewing your child or employee's smartphone and tablet usage." "Silently monitor text messages, GPS locations, call details, photos and social media activity. View the screen and location LIVE!" it brags. If it were truly on the up and up, it would give the monitored user a periodic heads up about being spied on. Despite its obvious application for illegal spying by fearful lovers, it's been written up as a nifty gadget for the holidays by the New York Times, including a screenshot of the app obviously being used to catch a cheater.
Sigh. Sure, technology like this can be legally used to monitor children and employees, but each app is designed to be used for illegal purposes and surreptitious surveillance. Each promises to "silently" monitor a phone, giving its owner no hint that the software is running. MSpy which warns employers they should get consent before using the product and says potential cuckolds shouldn't use it to get evidence of a spouse's infidelity then brags about the invisibility of its app, "which leaves virtually no chance for the user to identify this software."
The 23rd question in its Frequently Asked Questions section is "How can I detect spy software on my smartphone?" The answer is basically, "Ha." "We do not provide services on the detection of spyware products on mobile devices," it reads. "The information about installation or uninstallation of mSpy is confidential and can be provided to our clients only."
MSpy claims to have "1,000,000 customers", and includes some testimonials that, like those on other sites, are surely made up. Who would ever admit to using these apps? The "student," "business owner" and "mother" who offer testimonials on the site's front page are all (unsuspecting) Shutterstock models.
The FBI has quite a few more apps and websites to shut down, unless it only plans to make an example of the not-so-stealthy StealthGenie team.
