THOUSANDS of Americans have had ‘stalkware’ planted on their Android devices

By William On Oct 26, 2022

Thousands of Americans have fallen victim to stalkware planted on their smartphones by someone they know — and an Android app collects and stores their personal information.

TechCrunch has obtained leaked data from the app, TheTruthSpy, which has a database full of personal information such as call logs, text messages, location data and passwords of users in the US.

Map software revealed that the app captured 278,861 location data points from Americans over the course of six weeks — a total of 608,966 worldwide.

The database also contained 1.2 million text messages and 4.42 million call logs, including the duration of calls and the name and phone numbers of contacts.

TheTruthSpy has been the focus of several data dumps, including one in June, when the app was discovered to expose images of children and other personal photos from victims’ personal devices.

TheTruthSpy app captured 278,861 location data points from Americans over the course of six weeks – a total of 608,966 worldwide. TechCrunch, which obtained the data, reported that it could see precise locations, such as someone sitting on a train or in a church

DailyMail.com has reached out to TheTruthSpy for comment.

Launched in 2019, TheTruthSpy markets itself as a way for people to covertly monitor their spouses’ communications.

Reviews from those who bought the app said that it doesn’t deliver what it promises, but it seems that it can capture personal information from phones very easily.

TechCrunch reports that it has found approximately 360,000 unique device identifiers worldwide, a number associated with a smartphone and tablet, indicating how many devices were stripped of data during the operation that began on March 4 to April 14, 2022.

The database also contained passwords, text messages, and call logs from people who had placed the app on their Android smartphone.

The database revealed that the app captured 164 unique device identifiers in 11 US states during its operation that began March 4 through April 14, 2022.

Stalkware can spy on your phone

Stalkware is software that allows you to spy on someone’s phone or tablet.

They are often advertised to parents who want to monitor their child’s online activities, or to bosses who want to snoop on their employees.

Typically, stalkware allows you to remotely intercept messages, photos, browsing history, GPS coordinates, and even phone call data.

They work by associating an online account with an app installed on the device you want to spy on.

Users can then access the phone’s data remotely without the owner knowing they are under surveillance.

Stalkware apps are technically legal, but have caused controversy in the past when people used them for illegal espionage.

However, the location data is so specific that it shows victims riding buses, going to church and other “sensitive locations,” reports TechCrunch’s Zach Whittaker.

While the US had collected more data points, India came in second with over 77,425, Indonesia with over 42,701 and Argentina in fourth with 19,015.

The UK was in fifth place with 12,801 location data points collected.

TechCrunch also notes in its report that it observed data likely to come from children’s devices.

Breaking down the data to focus only on the US, the database shows 11 states where thousands of calls were recorded from 164 devices — California had the most compromised devices with 76.

The other states are: Pennsylvania (17 devices); Washington (16 devices); Nevada (14 devices); Illinois (14 devices0; Massachusetts (10 devices); Florida (six devices); New Hampshire (two devices); and Delaware with one device.

Photos and videos stored on the devices were also found in the database – a total of 473,211 records.

This allowed TechCrunch to search through screenshots, images exchanged in text messages, and images stored in the camera roll.

There were also 454,641 records of data taken from the user’s keyboard, a so-called keylogger, containing sensitive credentials and codes pasted by password managers and other apps.

And the database contained 231,550 records of networks each device connected to, such as the Wi-Fi network names of hotels, workplaces, apartments, airports and other guessable locations.