Back in the day when users didn't need to purchase an app to review it, the App Store was awash with fake reviews. Some of the best selling apps were the worst offenders (not going to name them, they know who they are). Once Apple closed this loophole, this tailed off as it was more difficult to setup shill accounts as you actually needed to buy mutiple copies of your app with real payment information (credit card, etc) per account. But when Apple decided to provide developers with promo codes all that changed. Once again, it's dead easy to setup shill accounts using promo codes and create dozens of fake reviews. A developer by the name of
Samir has created himself several dozen shill accounts and has used them to review all his sub-standard applications. From what I have seen, all of his applications are uniformly poor. I downloaded
iOthello, which is one of his games and has been in the top 100 board games on the US store for 2 weeks or more now. It is easily the worst Reversi game on the App Store, yet it's the best selling thanks to his fake reviews. Furthermore, I suspect his reversi app doesn't even have any real strategy programmed into it as the moves it made appeared to be random (generally bad moves).
I'm sure most developers give themselves a a nice juicy 5 star review using their own iTunes account. However, setting up dozens of shill accounts is something quite different. Tricking unsuspecting users into buying rubbish in this way is not only immoral, but is illegal in many countries (shilling is illegal in the UK). This behaviour is disgusting. Apple should permanently ban him and other developers that do this.
