Google has secured an injunction against the scammers behind OTCAI and other “click a button” Ponzi apps.

Google filed suit against Yunfeng Sun, aka Alphonse Sun and Hongnam Cheung, aka Zhang Hongnim and Stanford Fischer, on April 4th.

In its suit, which pushed RICO fraud charges, Google alleged Sun and Cheung had

engaged in a persistent, continuing scheme to defraud consumers, despite Google’s efforts to combat the scheme to protect users on its platforms by investigating and suspending offending fraudulent apps that Defendants uploaded to Google Play.

Google claims that, as at the time of its filing, it had spend over $75,000 “identifying and removing” Sun’s and Cheung’s “click a button” Ponzi apps.

Likely hiding somewhere in Asia, neither Sun or Cheung filed an answer to Google’s lawsuit.

Google filed for default on September 6th. The court granted and ordered default judgment on October 17th.

The court’s order issues an injunction against Sun and Cheung, prohibiting their use of Google’s services.

Defendants … are enjoined and restrained immediately and permanently from accessing or attempting to access Google’s services; creating or maintaining any Google accounts; using any Google products or services to promote any of Defendants’ apps, websites, or products; engaging in any activity that violates Google’s terms and any policies incorporated therein, and assisting, aiding, or abetting any other person or entity in engaging in or performing any of the activities complained of.

There is no monetary component to the judgment.

As someone who’s been tracking “click a button” app Ponzis since 2021, I’m not sure what effect Google’s injunction on just two individuals is going to have.

For starters these scammers clearly don’t care about the law. They’ll continue to spin up aliases to commit fraud with until the problem is addressed in the countries they operate from.

While I do come across “click a button” app Ponzis providing Google and Apple store links, typically it’s just an Android “apk” download (side-loaded installation).

“Click a button” app Ponzis are run by organized crime interests, operating out of protected compounds across Asia. The typical set up is Chinese criminals forcing human trafficked slaves to create and run the scams.

Local government and authorities are in on the racket and, so long as China or the hosting country aren’t targeted, nothing gets done.

The apps themselves are nothing special. They’re all clones of each other. It probably takes less than an hour to steal some photos, come up with a name and deploy a Ponzi app.

Promotion typically occurs through collaborating promoters and there are likely multiple layers to this. The YouTube and social media scammers are coordinated in separate Telegram channels. Potential investors, 99.9% of whom wind up being victims, are herded into public Telegram groups.

These groups change name frequently as the scams collapse and new ones are spun off and, over time, amass thousands of followers.

US authorities recently targeted one government collaborator in Cambodia, but clearly more needs to be done.

Between Google’s lawsuit and the recent Department of Treasury’s sanction, I haven’t seen any slowdown in “click a button” app Ponzi launches.

Given we’re talking about sovereign countries and rampant in-house corruption though, notwithstanding Chinese authorities doing little to reign in organized crime groups operating offshore (out of our country, not our problem), what “doing more” looks like remains unclear.