There is no app that lets you pull up someone else’s call history. There never has been, and there almost certainly never will be — carriers don’t expose that data, and no third-party developer has the access required to retrieve it. This is not a grey area; it is simply not possible. And yet, 7.3 million people, according to welivesecurity have downloaded apps that claimed to do exactly that.

Security researchers at ESET spent months untangling a sprawling family of 28 fraudulent Android apps they collectively dubbed CallPhantom — apps that promised users a window into anyone’s phone activity: call logs, SMS records, even WhatsApp history. Enter a number, pay a small fee, and the secrets of whoever you were looking up would supposedly come spilling out. What actually came out was fiction — random phone numbers dressed up with hardcoded names and timestamps, generated by the app itself, designed to look just convincing enough to seem real.…