Molinker, the prolific Chinese development company behind numerous iPhone apps, saw all its titles pulled from the App Store on Sunday after an attentive user noted that most - if not all - of its five-star reviews appeared to be fake. The scam caused over 1,000 apps - nearly 1% of all of the titles on the App Store - to disappear at once.
The user, "SCW," contacted a Glyn Evans of the iphoneography blog whom he knew to have contacts at Apple top management. SCW had noted something odd about the glowing (and poorly written) reviews of the "NightCam Pro" app and went through the applications offered by Molinker. As many as 90% of the reviews on some of their applications appeared to be written by a group of people who only reviewed Molinker applications. On “NightCam Pro”, for example, 42 of the 44 5-star reviews appeared to be fake.