DeFiLlama Delayed App Launch After Fake Apple Store Apps Targeted Users

DefiLlama delayed its own mobile app for months while it worked to get impersonator apps off Apple’s App Store, and one of those apps came down within days after the team let a test wallet be drained and sent Apple the evidence, pseudonymous founder 0xngmi said on 15 August.

“We had been trying to take down a fake DefiLlama app on Apple’s store for months, telling Apple about trademark violations, impersonation,” he wrote. “Then we loaded a small wallet, downloaded the app, got drained as expected and reported it to Apple. The app was taken down in days after that.” 

“We waited till all the fake apps were taken down before we launched ours to avoid any user getting scammed,” 0xngmi wrote in a second post, answering a user who asked whether the app he had installed was the real one. “But this meant delaying our app launch for months.”

Read more: Russia Opens the Door to BTC, ETH Trading—But Excludes XRP

Apple’s catalogue lists the genuine app, DefiLlama: DeFi Tracker, as published by DEFILLAMA LIMITED and released on 5 June, with version 1.0.5 dated 8 August. 

The Android build followed on 1 August and has passed 500 downloads. A search of Apple’s catalogue on 17 August returned a single DefiLlama app, the official one.

0xngmi pulled Aster’s perpetual volume off DefiLlama last October after its figures tracked Binance’s perpetuals too closely, saying at the time that the integrity of DefiLlama’s data was what he cared about.

Apple’s Own Numbers

Apple said in May that it stopped more than US$2.2 billion (AU$3.1 billion) in potentially fraudulent transactions during 2025, taking the six-year total past US$11.2 billion (AU$15.8 billion). 

It rejected more than 2 million app submissions, including “over 22,000 submissions that copied other apps, were found to be spam, or otherwise misled users”, and terminated 193,000 developer accounts. 

Its systems also blocked 1.1 billion attempts to create fraudulent customer accounts, deactivated 40.4 million existing ones and rejected more than 138,000 developer enrolments.

Moreover, nearly 59,000 apps were removed for bait-and-switch, which Apple describes as apps approved as ordinary utilities and then altered after review to commit financial fraud. Apple has published nothing about the DefiLlama impersonators.

Read more: CFTC Orders Kalshi to Keep Trading as Prediction-Market Power Fight Escalates