Canonical cracks down on crypto cons following Snap Store scam spree

After multiple waves of cryptocurrency credential-stealing apps were uploaded to the Snap store, Canonical is changing its policies. In what's expected to be a temporary measure, an announcement on the Snapcraft Discourse says that the Ubuntu vendor will switch to manual review of all new snap name registrations. The post from Holly Hall says: Over the recent weeks, the Snap Store has been under attack by various publishers attempting to upload malicious crypto-wallet snaps. Former Ubuntu staffer Alan "Popey" Pope has detailed some of this wave of scammy apps. Firstly, a fake "Exodus" wallet app caused one user to lose nine Bitcoins – currently worth roughly $490,000. This scam app from movementexod was masquerading as the real Exodus wallet from Exodus Movement – a company that already offers native Debian packages alongside its Windows and Mac versions. A few days later, Popey published a follow-up post including the response of Canonical founder and "self-appointed benevolent dictator for life" Mark Shuttleworth. You can read the discussions of the problem on the Snapcraft forums. (If you are inclined to join in, note that the Snapcraft Discourse instance has its own membership system, separate from the official Ubuntu instance.) The saga did not end there. This month, he detailed ten more fake wallets that appeared on the Snap Store, from an account called digisafe00000. When these were removed, the next day, replacements reappeared from a new account called codeshield0x0...