I make no bones about the fact that I have, what I thought to be, an irrational dislike of Apple products. However, the experience of someone I follow on Twitter has convinced me that there may be substance to my position.
This morning @RichardJohn awoke to find a series of around 15 emails from Apple's iTunes, each one telling him he'd just bought an £85 app from Storm8 LLC. They were all less than an hour old.
Whilst an initial telephone contact with iTunes gave much promise that they would help to resolve the issue, a later email told him that he would have to take it up with his Credit Card company to get the transactions cancelled. iTunes is, by implication, denying that the issue is their fault.
A very quick Google search suggests that @RichardJohn is not the first to suffer this type of fraud on iTunes. Indeed, not only is this fraud becoming significantly more common in the last month or so, supplier Storm8 LLC is associated with a number of these frauds as it is their products being purchased.
The frequency of these frauds would suggest that this is not a case of someone being a little careless with their account details but, quite possibly, a systemic weakness in iTunes' account security. At the very least, their fraud detection is crap. Seriously, who in their right mind would buy the same £85 app from a supplier 15 times in a 60 minute period? Does iTunes not monitor buying patterns to look out for fraud?
You'd think that Apple/iTunes would want to stamp out a fraud of this type before it affected the reputation of its service. However, despite a number of high profile blogs reporting the increase in this fraud recently, very little appears to be being done. iTunes has booted off one or two obviously dodgy developers. They have not, however, done anything about Storm8 LLC.
Apple's hesitancy could be because Storm8 does produce a distribute some genuine, reasonable apps. I had its World War game on my HTC Desire for a while. It makes its money from selling "in-game" currency or points (as Farmville does on Facebook). And it's the purchase of this that seems to be the subject of the fraud.
However, with the incredibly tight strangle-hold that Apple typically has over its markets, it would surely not be difficult to reverse out such obviously fraudulent transactions. If it was to deprive Storm8 of the revenue from these it would encourage Storm8 to investigate what is going on. With Storm8's help it surely can't be too difficult to trace where the benefit of these purchases is going and prosecute the perpetrators.
But this all hinges on Apple's & iTunes' willingness to accept that there is a problem and address it. Something Apple is not known for. It would rather deny the existence of a problem, push the blame somewhere else and address it only if and when there is a real up swell of public / media pressure.
Well, I can't wait for that. I, stupidly, used my bank debit card on my iTunes account. If someone was to run up a £1000 bill on that it would cripple me financially and I couldn't afford to wait the 2 to 4 weeks it would take to get my bank to reverse out the transactions. So I'm going to cancel my account.
I don't feel comfortable simply removing my card details. I want to delete my account completely.
Typically, they don't make this easy. There is no "Cancel my account" button.
Apparently you have to contact Apple from this page and tell them you wish to cancel your account. Something I will be doing this weekend.
