Because it is clear that some of you cant see the seriousness of the situation with the iTunes store, I am going to tell you the truth about what has been going on with your account.
Lets say you are a Chinese guy or girl with an iPhone or iPad and you want to get some music, movie or app. How you do you do it?
You go to
http://www.taobao.com: The (by far) largest online market in the world and type iTunes in the search bar. Inmediately you will be presented with a list of more than 7,000 items.
You want to save money, so you filter the list to show only items under RMB25.00- (USD3.60) and still you have more than 3,600 offers.
So you pick some one at random like, as an example, this one:
http://item.taobao.com/item.htm?id=5516054242
You open the online chat and you transfer him RMB22.00 (USD3.20)
He ask you in the online chat to provide a new iTunes account name and password, and you comply:
User:
qiuwge3foe3333@yahoo.com Passwd: qwer34567
He asks you to wait 10 minutes online. He has already a number of user accounts under surveillance, so he enters in the iTunes account of his victim, change his/her username and password to the one you provided, and come back to ask you try it and approve the trasaction so Taobao.com releases his money.
Even if you cant read Chinese you can see very clearly in his item description that this account will not last more than 24 hours (the time for his victim to see the charges mounting and then cancel the credit card).
He claims that he select his accounts so you can drain at least USD250.00 from them before they get cancelled. He urges you to be fast and buy and download as fast as you can. Start inmediately! Keep the download going on for the full 24 hours! There is no warranties on how long it will last!
Because he already changed the username and password, the victim cant stop you.
There are cheaper ways, of course! You can join a frenzy feeding, where the same hijacked account is sold to several customers. It is much slower and, because it was opened maybe hours ago, it will be much shorter lived. It can be had for RMB1.00 to RMB5.00 (USD 0.14 to USD 0.74).
The most important thing, however, is to BUY fast not to download fast. You can download at leisure during the next weeks. iTunes will not stop you: It will only remind you that your (victims) credit card is not working and invite you to update your payment details.
Then, if you want more applications later on, you just enter in Taobao.com and get again a new account in a few minutes.
This is the sad reality.
There are a lot of of things apple could do to stop this, like cancelling the hijacked accounts and deauthorizing its computers, making the whole process useless. But for what?
This is not a problem for Apple: It is a problem for the credit card industry. The account is right, the payment is right, end of the story. If you claim that someone used your credit card to buy things it is a problem between you and your bank, not between you and Apple!
Please note that when you are buying like crazy with your new account Apple doesnt bill directly to the credit card every time you add an item: It bills in batches of around (below) USD50. This is another detail that shows how cunning they are!
You buy, buy, and buy. And every time your reach 40-something dollars Apple invoices the card. If it pass, you can keep buying. If not, it stops you from buying more.
This achieves two things: One, it limits the damage to Apple as they only can get hooked for, at most, USD50.
Two, makes the whole system safer for them, as purchases under USD50 are not protected in the States law.
And it is funny that if that last transaction doesnt go through, then is when the rage of Apple comes over you for any item you may have already download before the invoicing point was reached.
Apple will put a flag on your account and will not allow you to download updates for any of the apps on your account (whatever order they came from) or download the pending episodes of your season passes).
In this case, you have no option but to go to Taobao.com and use another procedure.
There are people (the same people) who saves you time by doing in advance the whole process of providing the user, etc. Theyve already opened an account and used it to purchase one or two USD50.00 gift certificates. You get one (USD1.4) and use it to cover the debt with Apple so they can let you enjoy peacefully the items you own.