It is reported on several web sites now that top paid apps of Book category on App Store are stolen by some developers of Vietnam. Those developers are actually hacking the iTunes accounts of users to doing all that kind of activity.
You may read the full story of iTunes accounts hacked on the source and until next update we recommend you all to change your passwords of iTunes and PayPal as a precautionary measure.
Alex Brie Full Post:
I was contacted yesterday(Saturday July 3 2010) by another iPhone app developer, Patrick Thomson. Here’s what he told me:
I’m the developer of the QuickReader iPhone application. I’ve been noticing over the past few days that my app along with yours has been slipping down in the rankings. On trying to figure out why, I discovered what appears to be a concerted and criminal effort to game the Books category rankings.
It looks like the Books category has been hijacked by an app publisher named mycompany/Thuat Nguyen. His apps now occupy 40 of the top 50 ranks in the Books category on the app store. These are apps that typically wouldn’t rank in the Books category and most of them don’t have any ratings or reviews. However if you look at the reviews for the Conan 3 app, you can see that 2 reviewers complain (as early as Monday the 28th) that their iTunes accounts were hacked and the apps were purchased by the hacker. It would appear that this publisher is hacking accounts and buying his own apps in order to drive up his rankings in the Books category.
This is having a negative impact on our apps, which are being pushed down in the rankings and losing visibility, plus it makes for a bad user experience.