No APPetite for Apple 🍏
How one fake app stole $1.8 million.
It’s old news to say that its become harder to identify what’s real or isn’t real because of the rise of AI.
Take the three Bitcoin holders in this weeks edition. They lost $1.8 million dollars because of their inability to recognise a fake app from a real one. Nothing new, really.
But then they sued Apple.
Their decision to sue the tech giant asks the question, “who is responsible for vetting these tech projects and owning up for a lapsed judgement call?”
Will it be the consumer or the producer who will take the bulk of the blame?
This week, we look at:
Why The Clarity Act may not pass before The Senate’s summer recess.
Whether rare books are at risk.
How one app faked its place and cost three Bitcoin holders $1.8 million.
[Uncertainty on CLARITY 🔍]
The CLARITY Act entered the week with growing support from financial institutions. However, its path through the Senate is growing increasingly uncertain as lawmakers run out of time before the summer recess.
The Context 🧑💻:
The Senate has few floor days left before its summer recess begins on 8 August. Contested bills must pass through debate and cloture, limiting how many major items it can advance.
Senate leaders are prioritising federal nominations and a Russia sanctions bill, making it unlikely that CLARITY will clear the required steps before recess.
Institutional support is growing, with Franklin Templeton joining BlackRock, Fidelity and Goldman Sachs in backing the bill.
The bill is now likely to be delayed until September, leaving Congress with a much narrower window to pass Senate approval, another House vote, and final passage, all before attention shifts towards the November midterm elections.
The Coverage 📰:
“Crypto’s Clarity Act Faces Longer Odds Despite Industry’s Push” (Bloomberg)
“U.S. Senate puts off crypto Clarity Act for now as it focuses limited bandwidth elsewhere” (CoinDesk)
“CLARITY Act Shelved Until September” (Blockhead)
“Franklin Templeton Backs CLARITY Act as Wall Street Coalition Grows” (The Defiant)
PR Perspective 🔎:
The CLARITY Act is gaining institutional support at the same time as its legislative window is narrowing. The immediate challenge is less about industry demand and more about whether the Senate has enough time to complete the process. Communications should focus on the growing consensus around the need for clear market rules, while remaining cautious about predicting when those rules will arrive.
[The Rare Pages behind AI slop📚]
AI companies are buying books to train their AI models. Then they are destroyed.
The Context 🧑💻:
Back in early 2025, The Washington Post exposed Anthropic’s “Project Panama,” Anthropic’s effort to scan millions of books to train its AI model, Claude. The project resulted in more than 4,000 pages of a copyright lawsuit by book authors against Anthropic, valued at $183 billion by investors. Anthropic settled the case with a $1.5 billion payment.
Just shy of two years since Anthropic’s “Project Panama,” several more AI firms are reported to be buying books purposed toward training their AI models. Once they’ve been scanned and inputted into their training models, they are destroyed.
In July 2026, 404 Media reported a new trend: intermediaries profiting off AI companies who need books. Book-sellers, like ISBNdb (reported as as the “world’s largest book data base”) act as an intermediary and profit off of AI companies who need books.
Because of these intermediaries, many booksellers are receiving bulk purchases, sometimes unaware of whether AI companies (and which ones) could be buying even their rare books in at scale. This poises the problem of precious books becoming endangered.
The Coverage 📰:
“AI Book Burning? Companies Are Destroying Millions of Books to Feed Chatbots” (Decrypt)
“Inside an AI start-up’s plan to scan and dispose of millions of books” (The Washington Post)
“AI Companies Are Buying Tons of Old Books Because They’re Free of AI Slop” (404 Media)
PR Perspective 🔎:
With physical books being destroyed at a mass scale, we’ve asked the question, “What, in 2026, gives books their value?” Surely, for the sake of a society that has great books embedded in every corner of its flourishing, books don’t become a churn-and-burn exercise for companies like Anthropic and OpenAI to get richer. It’s a tale as old as time that books are essential for children to learn and grow their ability to think and understand. But what happens when book-sellers are so quick to dispose their books to AI models when they were made for humans to begin with?
[Trust Fall 🍏]
Apple’s App Store safety pitch just took a $1.8 million hit.
The Context 🧑💻:
Three Bitcoin holders sued Apple on July 24 in California federal court, saying a fake Sparrow Wallet app on the App Store cost them $1.8 million combined after they entered their seed phrases.
James Ramirez lost $875,000 and reported the app and the theft to Apple that same day. Nine days later, Christopher Ellis downloaded the same fake app and lost $840,000. Jalen Delgado lost $120,000. Apple never replied to either report, the suit says.
The real Sparrow Wallet only runs on desktop and has never had an iOS version, so any app by that name on the App Store is fake. The suit also claims Apple ranked the fake app and featured it in curated crypto collections next to real ones.
Sparrow’s creator, Craig Raw, has been flagging fake versions since January 2024. When he tried to submit his own listing warning iOS users Sparrow is desktop-only, Apple rejected it and flagged his developer account for removal.
Apple says it has since pulled the fake apps and banned the developers behind them, pointing to over 371,000 fraudulent submissions rejected last year. The suit seeks repayment plus damages, and wants Apple to disclose more about how it vets apps.
The Coverage 📰:
“Apple faces lawsuit over alleged Bitcoin scam” (The Street)
“Apple kept fake bitcoin wallet on App Store after $875,000 theft report, lawsuit alleges” (CoinDesk)
“Apple sued after alleged App Store crypto scam cost users $1.8M” (TechCrunch)
“Apple Sued After Fake iPhone Wallet App Drained $1.8M in Bitcoin” (Decrypt)
PR Perspective 🔎:
The irony is that Apple’s biggest argument against opening up the App Store, that its closed system keeps people safer than sideloading or third-party stores, is exactly what this case puts to the test. Ramirez reported the fake app the day he lost $875,000, and Apple sat on that report for nine days while Ellis lost $840,000 to the exact same listing. The whole safety pitch depends on someone actually acting on a report, and here nobody did.
Apple’s response leans on numbers that describe the system working in general, apps pulled, accounts banned, thousands of submissions rejected last year, but none of it touches what happened with this specific report. That gap between the general defence and the specific failure is what the lawsuit is built on, and it’s the part Apple hasn’t spoken to yet.
[Tweet of The Week]
Credit: @contextconor
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The usual disclaimer: This newsletter collates the main themes and headlines of the week in DeFi/crypto/metaverse/Web3/NFT land and tries to provide unbiased context. It’s aimed at anyone who wants to keep an eye on the space. It’s put together by a team at YAP and doesn’t contain any promotion of our clients (if one is mentioned, we’ll flag that).
The team: Founder Samantha Yap, Samvidha Sharma, Sofia Anderson, Wenwei See, Meghna Dembla, Shajar Qureshi, and TJ Thomas. Your feedback is, as always, welcome. Ping us at thecontext@yapglobal.com. Old newsletters can be found here.
This newsletter is prepared by YAP Global, a financial and technology PR consultancy that advises companies in the digital assets, fintech, stablecoins, AI, and agentic finance sectors. Find out more about us here.