Apple Removes Over 1000 Scam Apps From App Store

There is this app developer called Molinker who was involved in alleged review fraud. He was involved in close to one percent of all apps available on the App Store i,e., over 1000 apps had fraud reviews. Apple investigated this issue and yesterday it took action against this developer – he has been banned from the App Store and of its apps have been removed. AppleInsider has covered this news:

The issue was first brought to light by photo blog iPhoneography in a post highlighting the concerns of one of its regular readers. Reader SCW had concluded that app developer Molinker had been using its promo codes to write fake 5-star reviews of many of its apps. Each review shared the same short, disjointed style and the reviewers had only written reviews for other Molinker apps.

Most of Molinker’s apps dealt with photography, travel and public transportation. As per AppFreak, which was able to contact Molinker about this issue, they received the following response:

We got email from Apple yesterday which told us our contract is changed to pending status. Actually we do not know what’s wrong so far. We had contacted Apple for such sudden changes, hope we can get quick response and actions from Apple.

{Via AppleInsider}