It's interesting to look at the companies that are mentioned. Pearl-in-palm is based in Beijing and has been around for seven years [0]. They make games and thi

It's interesting to look at the companies that are mentioned. Pearl-in-palm is based in Beijing and has been around for seven years [0]. They make games and this one gets great ratings on the English store [1]. But very bad ratings on the Japanese store [2], saying things Google translates as "Amount has been exploited to gain unauthorized access". Based on this and on anto1ne's comment about Chinese "gift cards" [3], my guess is that the company is legit and that someone sells iTunes usernames passwords to individual gamers looking for extra points. There's another company mentioned in these discussions: Kamagame Poker. In fact, if you Google "Kamagame poker chip" the first two hits are people on Apple forums complaining about unauthorized charges. Same phenoma as above: great reviews in the US store, bad reviews in the Japanse store. Perhaps the Japanese are not interested in these two games, so a larger percentage of their downloads are scam related, while in the US the majority of downloads is legitimate? So here's an opportunity for some automated detective work: 1 - scrape all applications with in app purchases 2 - scrape US and Japanese reviews 3 - look for rating differentials (and of course terms like 'fraud', 'charge') Follow up with more manual labor: 1 - where are most of the customers of these apps? (China?) 2 - are these companies related? (I have no reason to suspect these two, but the bigger picture might look different) [0] http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/private/snapshot.asp?privcapId=28536716 http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/private/sn... [1] http://itunes.apple.com/en/app/id428912410?mt=8 http://itunes.apple.com/en/app/id428912410?mt=8 [2] http://itunes.apple.com/en/app/id428912410?mt=8 http://itunes.apple.com/en/app/id428912410?mt=8 [3] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2879423 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2879423