The makers of two phone monitoring services appear to have closed their doors after the owner agreed to settle state charges of illegally promoting spyware developed by his companies.
PhoneSpector and Highster were consumer phone monitoring apps that facilitated covert monitoring of a person’s smartphone. These apps, commonly called stalkerware (or spousal ware), are typically planted on a person’s phone, often by a spouse or domestic partner, usually with knowledge of the device’s passcode. These apps are designed to remain hidden from home screens, making them difficult to find and remove, while still uploading phone messages, photos and real-time location data to a dashboard that the abuser can view.
In February 2023, Patrick Hinchy, whose consortium of New York and Florida-based technology companies developed PhoneSpector and Highster, agreed to pay $410,000 in fines to settle accusations that Hinchy’s companies advertised and “aggressively promoted” spyware that allowed for the monitoring of people’s phones. secretly. Living in New York State.
New York Attorney General Letitia James He said at the time That Hinchy Companies used blog posts explicitly encouraging potential customers to use spyware to monitor their spouses’ devices without their knowledge. As part of the deal, the Hinchy companies agreed to modify apps to alert device owners that their phones have been monitored.
Since the settlement, both PhoneSpector and Highster have gone offline.
The PhoneSpector website stopped loading in the weeks following the settlement. His domain is now redirecting to the Indonesian lottery website. Highster stopped loading after several months.
The known domains, servers and back-end infrastructure used by PhoneSpector and Highster are no longer available on the Internet.
TechCrunch called the phone numbers associated with PhoneSpector and Highster customer service but an automated message appeared saying the numbers had been disconnected. Office space in Port Jefferson Village, New York, registered with The Hinchy Companies, is currently occupied by a construction company.
Nearly all of Hinchy’s registered companies in New York and Florida are still active, according to public records searches conducted by TechCrunch, but the companies have not filed paperwork with the states for several years and are classified as “past due” for updates. Companies are typically required to file paperwork every two years or face dissolution by state authorities.
Hinchy did not respond to multiple requests for comment from TechCrunch. Michael Weinstein, who represented Hinchey as part of the settlement, deferred comment to the New York Attorney General’s Office.
Delaney Kempner, communications director for the New York Attorney General’s Office, did not answer TechCrunch’s questions about the settlement via email, including whether Hinchy’s companies paid the $410,000 fine as agreed upon. Kempner would not grant TechCrunch’s request for a recorded call. In response to specific questions about the case, Kempner told TechCrunch via email that the recent unspecified filings will answer some of our questions. “I hope you know how to find them :)” Kempner said.
PhoneSpector and Highster are two of the latest stalkerware apps to go offline in recent years after regulatory action.
In 2019, the Federal Trade Commission Charges brought against phone monitoring app maker Retina-X, accusing the company of failing to ensure its app was used for legitimate compliance purposes, and of failing to adequately secure sensitive phone data it seized from the phones of unknown device owners after they suffered several data breaches. Retina-X Eventually shut down.
After one year, The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has banned stalkerware maker SpyFone and its CEO Scott Zuckerman from the surveillance industry, also accused the company of failing to protect data it secretly collected from unwitting victims’ phones. A TechCrunch investigation later found that Zuckerman returned with a new stalkerware application called SpyTrac, which was shut down shortly after TechCrunch contacted Zuckerman for comment.