The current state of the art that I've noticed for App Store review spam is to:
1) Create accounts well ahead of time
2) Use the accounts to give nearly-always-five-star reviews to several highly-rated and frequently-reviewed free apps, such as Angry Birds Free, Instagram, etc.
3) Age the accounts for a while (weeks maybe) while continuing to repeat steps 1 and 2 to create more accounts.
4) Having collected enough seasoned accounts, use them all at once to pile on fraudulent downloads and nearly-all-five-star reviews to maximize chart impact.
The result is many fraudulent positive reviews for not just appspam but popular legitimate apps as well. Many popular free apps end up with many more reviews that are overwhelmingly positive (a rich-get-richer effect) and have the trademark brief and too-weird proto-English that characterize fake app reviews.
It's a strange phenomenon -- try reading a few pages of Angry Birds Free reviews sometime (preferably morning hours in North America) and you'll see what I mean. The developers of top free apps are receiving (and benefitting from) spam reviews they never solicited.
1) Create accounts well ahead of time
2) Use the accounts to give nearly-always-five-star reviews to several highly-rated and frequently-reviewed free apps, such as Angry Birds Free, Instagram, etc.
3) Age the accounts for a while (weeks maybe) while continuing to repeat steps 1 and 2 to create more accounts.
4) Having collected enough seasoned accounts, use them all at once to pile on fraudulent downloads and nearly-all-five-star reviews to maximize chart impact.
The result is many fraudulent positive reviews for not just appspam but popular legitimate apps as well. Many popular free apps end up with many more reviews that are overwhelmingly positive (a rich-get-richer effect) and have the trademark brief and too-weird proto-English that characterize fake app reviews.
It's a strange phenomenon -- try reading a few pages of Angry Birds Free reviews sometime (preferably morning hours in North America) and you'll see what I mean. The developers of top free apps are receiving (and benefitting from) spam reviews they never solicited.