
The stalkerware apps PhoneSpector and Highster appear to be shut down
The operators of two phone monitoring services appear to have closed after the owner agreed to settle government charges of illegally promoting spyware his companies developed.
PhoneSpector and Highster were consumer phone monitoring apps that enabled covert monitoring of a person’s smartphone. Commonly referred to as stalkerware (or spouseware), these apps are typically installed on a person’s phone, often by a spouse or domestic partner and usually with knowledge of the device passcode. These apps are designed to remain hidden from home screens, making them difficult to find and remove, while continuously uploading the phone’s messages, photos and real-time location data to a dashboard visible to the perpetrator.
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 penalties to resolve allegations that Hinchy’s company promoted and “aggressively promoted” spyware. that enabled the secret telephone surveillance of individuals living in New York State.
New York Attorney General Letitia James said at the time that Hinchy’s companies used blog posts that specifically encouraged potential customers to use the spyware to monitor their spouses’ devices without their knowledge. As part of the agreement, Hinchy’s companies agreed to modify the apps to alert device owners that their phones were being monitored.
Since the agreement, both PhoneSpector and Highster have been offline.
PhoneSpector’s website stopped loading in the weeks following the settlement. The domain now redirects to an Indonesian lottery website. Highster’s website stopped loading a few months later.
The domains, servers and back-end infrastructure known to be used by PhoneSpector and Highster are also no longer online.
TechCrunch called phone numbers associated with PhoneSpector and Highster customer service, but an automated message said the numbers had been disconnected. The office space in the New York village of Port Jefferson, registered to Hinchy’s company, is currently used by a construction company.
Nearly all of Hinchy’s registered companies in New York and Florida remain active, public records obtained by TechCrunch show, but the companies have not filed with the states in several years and updates are considered “overdue.” Companies usually have to submit documents every two years, otherwise they risk being dissolved by state authorities.
Hinchy did not respond to multiple requests for comment from TechCrunch. Michael Weinstein, who represented Hinchy in 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 respond to TechCrunch’s questions about the settlement via email, including whether Hinchy’s companies had paid the agreed-upon $410,000 penalty. Kempner did not want to agree to TechCrunch’s request for a confidential conversation. In response to specific questions about the case, Kempner told TechCrunch via email that unspecified recent filings would answer some of our questions. “Hopefully you know how to find them :),” Kempner said.
PhoneSpector and Highster are the latest stalkerware apps to go offline in recent years due to government action.
In 2019, the Federal Trade Commission filed charges against phone monitoring app maker Retina-X. She accused the company of failing to ensure that its app was used for legitimate consensual purposes and of failing to adequately secure the sensitive phone data it extracted from the phones of unwitting device owners after multiple data breaches. Retina-X was eventually shut down.
A year later, the FTC banned stalkerware maker SpyFone and its CEO Scott Zuckerman from the surveillance industry and also accused the company of failing to protect the data it secretly collected from unwitting victims’ phones. A TechCrunch investigation later revealed that Zuckerman came back with a new stalkerware app called SpyTrac, which was shut down shortly after TechCrunch reached out to Zuckerman for comment.