Receipt for Apps I have not bought!

[Sheza]

I just found this in my Inbox:

In actual fact last time I bought anything from the App Store was over 4 months ago. I use Gift Cards to buy my Apps and was keeping £15 in there to save up for some useful apps. These are all camera-related apps. Most are from the same developer.

Is this the same problem as before where people were being billed for some junk comic books?

Can anyone help me with what evidence I need to give to Apple to tell them that I haven't actually bought any of these apps?

 

[dtblaze]

unfortunately since its a gc u prob cant dispute...if only it was a credit card

 

[ClutchThese]

change your password. change your billing info.

probably gonna have to eat the loss.

 

[Sheza]

I've changed all that besides Billing Info since there are no credit cards attached, thank god. Contacted Apple. If they need any proof it's me, they can see that, up until now of course, I haven't spent money on any apps since I added the credit.

Seriously what is up with these sad Chinese hackers.

 

[psonice]

Your account was somehow hacked. Make sure you're using a hard to guess password (ideally 8 characters long, including some capital letters and numbers). Also check your email address is correct on your account, if the hacker has changed that they can request a password reset.

Then, get in touch with apple - they should refund this.

Actually, speaking as a developer that receipt is *very* interesting. Look at the developers of the apps - what are the chances that somebody would use a hacked account to buy 10 apps from so few developers? It doesn't look much like somebody hacked your account to buy some apps they wanted - it looks more like somebody hacked it to buy apps to push them up the rankings.

Can you see it "you" left reviews for any of those apps? (a couple seem to be missing from the store btw!)

 

[Sheza]

"I" haven't left nay reviews - not sure about rating.

But on three of the apps in my receipt there are reviews from the same person. Now - why would someone by a ton of camera apps and give them all 5-stars?

I also saw they were mostly rated 5/5 with a few 1/5 from actual people. The night vision app just adds a green tint to the screen according to one reviewer.

 

[Sheza]

You have GOT to be kidding me!

What the actual hell is this? I changed my password & security question!

The same developers. The same trash apps! I thought a restrictive app store would kick out trash apps. So much for Apple controlled.

I have changed my password to one that is even more secure with upper, lowercase and numbers.

 

[psonice]

Looks hugely suspicious to me! If anyone else has had this happen, please post up your receipts (with the personal info blanked out like Sheza has done - if you're not sure how, ask) so we can see what's really going on here!

Did you get these 'purchases' refunded by apple?

 

[JulianL]

You have GOT to be kidding me!

What the actual hell is this? I changed my password & security question

Sorry to hear about all your problems. This really sucks.

One thought on the second fraud. I'm in the UK too and my receipts usually come at least a couple of days after I actually made my purchase, sometimes even 3 or 4 days later. Maybe this second set of "purchases" (thefts) was done the day after the first lot, but before you'd even seen the first receipt and tried to change the password. Just a though which I hope is right since that is slightly less scary for you.

One other thought. Might you have a keylogger on your system that caught your original password but is also sending your new ones to the fraudsters as well? It might be worth making sure you use a different machine or your iPhone/iPad to change your password next time and do an audit of the security on whatever machine(s) you've been using to log into any accounts that use your apple ID (appstore, mobileme, etc) to search for keyloggers or unknown browser extensions.

- Julian