The makers of two phone monitoring services appear to have shut down after the owner agreed to settle state charges of illegally promoting spyware his companies developed.
PhoneSpector and Highster were consumer-grade phone tracking apps that made it easy to secretly monitor a person’s smartphone. Commonly called stalkerware (or spouseware), these apps are usually placed on a person’s phone, often by a spouse or domestic partner, and usually with knowledge of the device’s password. These apps are designed to remain hidden from home screens, making them difficult to find and remove, while constantly uploading the phone’s real-time messages, photos, and location data to a user-viewable dashboard .
In February 2023, Patrick Hinchy, whose New York and Florida-based consortium of technology companies developed PhoneSpector and Highster, agreed to pay $410,000 in penalties to settle charges that Hinchy’s companies advertised and “promoted aggressive” spyware that allowed people to be secretly monitored by telephone. who lives in New York state.
New York Attorney General Letitia James he said then that Hinchy’s companies used blog posts that specifically encouraged prospective clients to use the spyware to monitor their spouses’ devices without their knowledge. As part of the settlement, Hinchy’s companies agreed to modify the apps to alert device owners that their phones had been tracked.
Since the settlement, both PhoneSpector and Highster have gone offline.
PhoneSpector’s website stopped loading in the weeks after the settlement. His domain now redirects to an Indonesian lottery site. Highster’s website stopped loading several months later.
Domains, servers and support infrastructure known to be used by PhoneSpector and Highster are no longer connected.
TechCrunch called phone numbers associated with PhoneSpector and Highster customer service, but an automated message said the numbers were disconnected. The office space in the village of Port Jefferson, New York that is registered to Hinchy’s companies is currently occupied by a construction company.
Almost all of Hinchy’s registered companies in New York and Florida remain active, according to public records searches by TechCrunch, but the companies haven’t filed with the states in several years and have been labeled “overdue” for updates. Companies are usually required to submit documents every two years or face liquidation by government authorities.
Hinchy did not respond to multiple requests for comment from TechCrunch. Michael Weinstein, who represented Hinchy as part of the settlement, deferred comment to the New York attorney general’s office.
Delaney Kempner, director of communications for the New York attorney general’s office, did not respond to TechCrunch’s questions about the settlement via email, including whether Hinchy’s companies paid the $410,000 penalty as agreed. Kempner would not agree to TechCrunch’s request for an on-the-record call. In response to specific questions about the case, Kempner told TechCrunch via email that unspecified recent depositions would answer some of our questions. “Hopefully you know how to find them :)” said Kempner.
PhoneSpector and Highster are the latest stalkerware apps to be taken offline in recent years following regulatory action.
In 2019, the Federal Trade Commission pressed charges against phone-tracking app maker Retina-X, accusing the company of failing to ensure its app was used for lawful, consensual purposes and of failing to adequately protect sensitive phone data it collects from the phones of unknown device owners following multiple data breaches. Retina-X finally closed.
A year later, the FTC banned stalkerware maker SpyFone and its CEO Scott Zuckerman from the surveillance industry, also accusing the company of failing to protect the data it secretly collected from the phones of unwitting victims. A TechCrunch investigation later found that Zuckerman was back with a new stalkerware app called SpyTrac, which was shut down shortly after TechCrunch contacted Zuckerman for comment.
