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Comment by nihonde | Hacker News Reader

Eh? It's very vague in the blog post, but it sounds like the developer paid for an Apple account and the device which were used to create fraudulent reviews. That last looks quite bad and makes Apple's position more understandable. Why isn't the developer explaining what happened with the dev account that they opened and funded? You can't just say "I haven't done anything wrong" under those circumstances without explaining who controls the offending account and why they might be manipulating App Store reviews.

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Did we read the same article? He used his credit card to pay for a friend's developer account and gave her one of his old devices to test on. Though he didn't mention it (sticking to facts) it looks like he was teaching someone how to make an iOS app and provided a bit of charity.

The question is why was that account involved in review manipulation

Because he skipped the lesson about Apple having automated systems to catch review manipulators. So this newbie developer had some marketer friend whisper in her ear, "hey you can hire these guys to promote your shitty little food app, it's like $200 and I know someone who did it and made a billion dollars"

Which sounds like a load of bull to me, but is ultimately irrelevant. As if someone wjo didn't even know how to set up an account and didn't have their own devices is going to engage in fraud.

He got caught and didn't realize they would make the connection, so he's blaming someone else.

Don't assume the fraudulent reviews were intentional by either party. Spam systems are well-known to post reviews of completely unrelated products in order to make their intentional fraudulent activity appear more legitimate. It happens on Amazon, Yelp, basically everywhere.

It's the same tactic that makes Facebook advertising so useless. You have millions of fake people posting regular fake "updates" complete with fake GPS locations just so that some of them can provide fake traffic for pages when someone pays.

I want to see the proof that the reviews were fake in the first place and I want to see all the reviews posted by these supposedly fake users.

It probably won't happen but here's to hoping. Maybe some public visibility into these sorts of things will breed sympathy for Apple's position because it's a real problem and it's very difficult to solve.

...and mysteriously, this friend spontaneously began posting fraudulent reviews relating to this guy's app?

Sounds like bullshit to me.

They didn't relate to Kapeli's app at all, other than that the account on which they were made was created by his credit card and on an old machine he gave away.

Now, on the friend’s (relative, actually) apps. She continued to use the account, published 20-odd crappy apps and paid for fake reviews for these apps.

I think the fact that he was not notified about this suspicious activity on linked account renders all this as Apple wrong doing. Doesn't matter whether Dash dev actually gave his phone to someone or actually was doing something fishy by himself, failing to notify account before closing it just doesn't seem fair to me.

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