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
This may be just a coincidence, but just after I read this, I went to my credit card page and found out that someone had hacked my credit card for over 3k worth of travel, shows, food and stuff, overseas, during the same time frame. Thanks Scott for the heads up
WuLung
Don TerHaar
So are you guys doing a show this week?
So are you guys doing a show this week? If so, when???
Strange I am an iPhone developer and something weird happened to me, our free app which had been downloaded maybe 20 times in France was suddenly no 3 in the French chart and we had 1000 downloads in like 4 days. We as a team had done nothing to promote or manipulate the market there so something had to have been messed up by apple or someone else. There is something weird going down in the AppStore, and we got a bunch of 1 star reviews there cos our app doesn’t support the language, well IT’S NOT MEANT to if course!
Just a bit weird that if the same thing happened to me (only had one app available at the time) as this guy, then maybe he wasn’t to blame, I certainly did nothing to manipulate our sales, and maybe this guy did nothing either.
I am not a conspiracy theorist by any means, but maybe this guy took the sword (held by apple) only cos it was noticed and complained about, and the real mess up here was apple as it happened about the same time my app went stellar in France.