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Chinese language freemium game Three Kingdoms storms UK iPhone top grossing chart, but is it a scam?

Users complain about unauthorised in-app purchases

Chinese language freemium game Three Kingdoms storms UK iPhone top grossing chart, but is it a scam?
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As Apple's App Store team prepares for its Holiday break, there's always plenty of jockeying by developers.

They're all trying to ensure their apps get good chart placement during the eight day period when the App Store chart positions are locked.

Still, aside from all the 99c sales, we didn't expect to see a Chinese language freemium game leaping up the UK top grossing iPhone charts.

What's up?

What's really intriguing are three of the four review comments left on iTunes.

Dated 12 Dec, Duncan Adkinson claimed 'Fraud'.

"Just been charged £69.99 for this game regarding in-app purchases," he writes.

"Never used this game before or ven [sic] heard of it. Beware..."

Similarly, on 11 Dec, idtomcat said "2 games were downloaded acharged [sic] at £9.98 from my online credit ... This is a scam dont download..."

Even more strange is that on 18 Dec, Mark Wilson wrote, "This app just appeared on my iPhone, I never purchased it yet my account was debited £20. Have contacted Apple. Some kind of fraud / hacking me thinks!"

Since then, the game has been updated to version 1.4 on 20 December, with it peaking at #3 on the UK top grossing iPhone chart today, although it's since dropped down to #5 thanks to EA's annual 69p sale.

Big in China

Checking out the company behind the game, Hoolai is a Chinese developer of mobile and Facebook apps, which was founded in 2008. It's released five iOS apps, of which four are versions of this game.

As for the game itself, Hoolai Three Kingdoms is a freemium tactical war game loosely based on Chinese history, which has been very successful in Asia, being the #1 iPhone grossing app in China in September, and also released in Japan, Korea and for iPad.

Hence, there's no suggestion that the developer is behind what if those three reviews are anything to go by, could turn out to be a serious breach of iTunes security.

Big cash

Yet, if the game's position in the UK top grossing chart is correct, hundreds of players would have had to have bought in-app purchases, in which case you'd think they'd either be writing about how great the game was, or if it was a scam, be complaining loudly to Apple.

Ominously, the most popular IAP transaction is listed on the App Store as being the £69.99 option, which is not what would be expected from a normal gaming audience - that would be 69p.

With iTunes receipts taking a couple of days to be emailed to users, Pocket Gamer will certainly be monitoring the situation as it develops.

Jon Jordan
Jon Jordan
A Pocket Gamer co-founder, Jon can turn his hand to anything except hand turning. He is editor-at-large at PG.biz which means he can arrive anywhere in the world, acting like a slightly confused uncle looking for the way out. He likes letters, cameras, imaginary numbers and legumes.