But according to the email I got, he was now ready to tone up more than his thumbs. He had one free week to get stacked, and then I’d be paying $4.49 a week to keep him at peak fitness.

It was, of course, a scam.

The Android store is famously full of toxic software but Apple’s app stores have, until recently at least, enjoyed a cleaner reputation. It’s weird because Apple’s customers are known for being much easier to monetise (i.e. shake down) than el Goog’s.

It makes sense for scammers to target them.

The fruit company has been quietly hosing the crap out of its app stores for the last few weeks, delisting dozens of subscription-based apps that were raking in suspiciously large sums of money for what they were. Example? A QR code reader sucking nearly $200 a year off your credit card.

Our sketchy little software bandit was called 30 Day Fitness Challenges and on its iTunes page you’ll find a bunch of one-star reviews all demanding their money back and warning off clueless gumbies.

This isn’t a knock on Apple. (I still love you, Tim, please return my emails.) They have started to aggressively police the app store for these things, but when you’re running a multibillion-dollar marketplace, there’s always gonna be blindspots and back alleys.

So you should check your own subscriptions right now. It’s worth doing every couple of months anyway because we tend to sign up for things and quickly forget about them. That’s the entire business model of the gym industry after all, which coincidentally, is not a thousand miles removed from a very expensive little app called 30 Day Fitness Challenge.