Adobe Flash Player Scam Asks People To Buy It Although The App is Free

Account to ESET, Google has removed another malicious application from the Android store. Unfortunately, this application has had 100.000 – 500.000 downloads since November 2016.

Unlike other malware applications, this F11 application didn’t contain any harmful code. However, it has tricked the users to pay $19 for “Adobe Flash Player.” As most of you already know, the Flash Player for Android is FREE, but it has been discontinued back in 2012, as it had some real security issues.

“Paid” Adobe Flash Player: How It Works

After you download the application from the Google Play Store (keep in mind that the app has been removed from the official Android store, but the scam still exists), you will notice that a tutorial will pop-up with detailed instructions on how to download the “Flash Player.” In that web page, the user is redirected to PayPal to pay $19 to buy the Flash Player 11 for the Android device.

Keep in mind that only Adobe, the developer of Flash Player and the only company that has all rights on this application. However, Adobe is giving its Flash Player for FREE and some bad people have taken advantage of that and trying to sell it to some naive users.

The trick is that along with a link to a Flash Player installation tutorial, the victims will also be prompted to install Dolphin or Firefox browser (both of them are FREE). These two browsers support Flash Player by default as they come with the plugin for playing Flash content.

Getting Your Money Back

If you’ve fallen victim to this scam and made the purchase via your PayPal account, then you can open a dispute of that transaction (after a transaction has ended you have 180 days to open a dispute about it). After explaining your issue and how you got tricked, PayPal will most likely give your money back.