I received the following email from Apple this morning.
Subject: Notification of Apple Developer Program License Agreement (PLA) violation
We are writing to inform you that your company is not in compliance with the Apple Developer Program License Agreement (PLA).
Section 11.2 (Termination) states:
(g) if You engage, or encourage others to engage, in any misleading, fraudulent, improper, unlawful or dishonest act relating to this Agreement, including, but not limited to, misrepresenting the nature of Your Application (e.g., hiding or trying to hide functionality from Apple’s review, falsifying consumer reviews for Your Application, engaging in payment fraud, etc.).
Be aware that manipulating App Store chart rankings, user reviews or search index may result in the loss of your developer program membership.
Please address this issue promptly.
We carefully reviewed all our apps, metadata, etc and have not found anything in violation or non-compliant with the PLA. We are absolutely not engaged fraudulent behaviour, and have been operating smoothly for years now.
One anomaly I can think of is the RC outage on February 10. Customers were unable to unlock content even after paying. Perhaps Apple detected this as a form of payment fraud?
Furthermore, an unusual number of developers received this same email today as evident on the developer forums.
Any advice or guidance? Can folks at RC reach out to their Apple contacts and sort this out for us?
Thank you