Android help

[Jefferson Goodrich]

Ok. My phone is compromised. There are apps in my phone that I havnt downloaded. But yet they exist. some I can uninstall. And I do. But they pop right back up . most of the apps I cannot see There permission. NOR CAN I Shut them down nor uninstall them for they are greyed out. Factory reset. Hard reset. Every reset I know, IVE tried. And when phone boots all back up. POOF!! THEY ARE STILL IN MY PHONE. THE APPS CAN READ AND WRITE MY TEXT, E-MAILS AND STOP THEM. RE-WRITE THE TEXT AND ALSO STOP MY OUTGOING MAIL. AND TEXT AND RE-WRITE THEM WITHOUT MY PERMISSION OR KNOWLEDGE. ALSO APPS TO RE-ROUTE MY CALLS STOP MY CALLS AND STOP XALLS FROM ME HEARING AND OR KNOWING. AND SO MUCH MORE. THEY OWN MY PHONE AND KEEPS ME FROM GOING ON SECURRED SITES. LIKE I SAID. FACTORY RESET DOES NOTHING I am positive.110% positive, Beyond any doubts at all . I need help

 

[Dannydet]

Change your Gmail credentials.
Remove your Gmail account from your device

 

[The_Chief]

First: turn off that phone and leave it off!
Second: change every login credential you had saved on your phone. If you did any kind of banking or had a credit card stored on the phone, change your bank credentials and consider your card compromised. Change passwords to everything using a PC or other device.

The reason the apps don't show up in your app drawer is because they were installed as system apps, like the phone and camera. They are part of the operating system. That's also why factory reset will not remove them: all a factory reset does is remove all user data from the device. It will not affect anything in the Android /system partition. This can happen when an app is installed from an unscrupulous source, and its permissions allow it full network access and to install other apps. It's a far more common problem that most would care to think, because so many people don't look at permissions before installing.

At this point, even if you were rooted no one would know what to tell you to look for and remove. My best suggestion to you is to take the phone to a repair facility where it can be 100% wiped; and the latest stock operating system reflashed to it. That's the only way I can see you're going to get rid of all the adware, malware and spyware.

 

[Hadron]

What phone do you have? Because malware that can infect the system is extremely rare these days (was much more common - though still very rare - back in the days of Android 5 and earlier), so I'm curious about this.

I agree with the diagnosis above: if you have an infected system the only thing to do is reflash the phone completely, i.e. overwrite the system with a clean set of software. And if you don't know how to do that yourself, get a professional to do it. Also if it's that owned you have to consider the possibility of a keylogger or similar, so don't use it for anything confidential (i.e. Danny's advice to remove the account from the phone and change the login credentials). And also make sure any accounts are properly secured in future (e.g. if you don't use 2 factor authentication you should start).

 

[Davdi]

But DO NOT use the compromised phone for the second factor.