[News] iTunes App Store hit by developer and account fraud

[AdminOnline]

Apple's iTunes Store users are increasingly being targeted in a number of fraud cases, some of which appear to be orchestrated by iOS app developers seeking to boost their sales rankings, and others which appear to be a widespread hack of user accounts.

While the billions of songs and apps being sold in the iTunes Store to millions of account holders are certain to bring with it a certain amount of fraudulent purchase reports, a new wave of very suspicious app purchases appear to have boosted the sales of a single App Store developer to an overwhelming 40 spots of the top fifty apps in the books category.

The books in question are a low-quality series of mostly Japanese manga titles all published by "developer" Thuat Nguyen, whose publishing company is listed by Apple as "mycompany" with a website of "Home.com." It's impossibly unlikely that 80% of the American App Store's book sales were legitimately dominated by sales of shoddy anime book apps that are not localized, appear to violate intellectual property rights, and were all dumped into the App Store at once over a period of a couple days.

Even more worrying is that sales of the junk apps are being reported by multiple users in iTunes as fraud activity. User ratings on the titles frequently complain about having discovered the purchase as part of fraud activity on their accounts. A flurry of positive reviews say simple things like, "it's great" and "good, this story is very interesting," creating the appearance that they have been added by the same group behind the fraud sales.

The fraudulent book sales are not just overwhelming the App Store charts with junk; they're also pushing legitimate titles by real developers out of the view of shoppers, devaluing the iTunes Store in the minds of users, and eroding Apple's position that the App Store is a carefully curated marketplace that doesn't suffer from the junkware bloat and intellectual property fraud of Google's Android Market.

Source - http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/07/04/itunes_app_store_hit_by_developer_and_account_frau d.html

[hurt_confuzd]

Go chew bubble gum.