Over the weekend many reports of fraud on the App Store occurred after a rogue developer managed to get over 40 of his apps on the App Store?s top sales rankings.After many user complaints apple has since removed all apps and the developer?s account.The real question following this event was How did these apps get on the top selling charts? While the topic of the App Store being hacked hasn?t been touch upon,Apple has since released the following response to Engadget, who earlier questioned how these apps reached such high rankings.

The response to Engadget is as follows:

The developer Thuat Nguyen and his apps were removed from the App Store for violating the developer Program License Agreement, including fraudulent purchase patterns.

Developers do not receive any iTunes confidential customer data when an app is downloaded.

If your credit card or iTunes password is stolen and used on iTunes we recommend that you contact your financial institution and inquire about canceling the card and issuing a chargeback for any unauthorized transactions. We also recommend that you change your iTunes account password immediately. For more information on best practices for password security visit http://www.apple.com/support/itunes.

It was later reported that only a very small percentage of accounts were targeted and apple has since put in better security measures to assure there won?t be a repeat of this, iTunes will ask for the verification code on the back of your credit card “a little more often” from now on. – Rhys Murphy