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The makers of two phone surveillance services appear to have shuttered after the owner agreed to settle state accusations of illegally promoting spyware that his companies developed. PhoneSpector and Highster were consumer-grade phone monitoring apps that facilitated the covert surveillance of a person's smartphone. In February 2023, Patrick Hinchy, whose consortium of New York and Florida-based tech companies developed PhoneSpector and Highster, agreed to pay $410,000 in penalties to settle accusations that Hinchy's companies advertised and "aggressively promoted" spyware that allowed the secret phone surveillance of individuals living in New York state.
A short-lived spyware operation called Oospy, which emerged earlier this year after its predecessor Spyhide was hacked, is no longer operational and has shut down. Oospy appeared online in late July as a rebrand of a phone monitoring app called Spyhide, which was facilitating the surveillance of tens of thousands of Android device owners around the world. Spyhide shut down after a breach exposed the operation and its administrators who were profiting from it.
A hacker has stolen the messages, call logs and locations intercepted by a widely used phone monitoring app called LetMeSpy, according to the company that makes the spyware. The phone monitoring app, which is used to spy on thousands of people using Android phones around the world, said in a notice on its login page that on June 21, "a security incident occurred involving obtaining unauthorized access to the data of website users." LetMeSpy is a type of phone monitoring app that is marketed for parental control or employee monitoring.