An iPhone developer appears to have paid people to give its application glowing reviews in an effort to boost sales.

The developer of Santa Live, a jokey iPhone app for kids, appears to have posted a listing on Amazon's Mechanical Turk offering to pay $4

for the highest-rated reviews on Apple's iPhone App Store.

"So for this hit, all you have to do is download the application (1.99) and then leave a 5 star review for the app in iTunes or the App Store," said the posting, which has now been taken down, but is preservedhere by a screenshot taken by "Techtistic," a reader of The Unofficial Apple Weblog.

It's no surprise to see developers taking aim at the App Store, which has been a gold mine for coders thanks to the enormous population of iPhone users downloading applications. In September, independent developer Steve Demeter announced earning $250,000 in just two months with his iPhone game Trism. Many other programmers are reporting similar success.

Glowing reviews can make or break an app in the App Store – a fact Apple recently acknowledged when it changed the rules regarding reviews. In the past, anyone could review an app without even downloading it. Apple saw that was unfairly hurting – or favoring – some developers, so the company revised the policy, requiring customers to download an app in order to rate it.

In the screenshot, the Mechanical Turk listing offers $4, asking "workers"

to download the $2 app and leave it a five-star review, earning $2 in profit. The listing asks participants to identify themselves in the App Store by sticking five periods (.....) somewhere in the review.

Currently, out of the 22 reviews for the app, there are six including five dots.

Casual Game Network developed the app, and its CEO Adam Majewski, whose name is listed as the "Requestor" in the screenshot, neither denied nor confirmed the marketing method.

"I can't speak to the marketing efforts being done," Majewski told Wired.com. "There's numerous being done by people in my organization, and I don't know the day-to-day aspects ... so I can't speak to that specific approach [on Mechanical Turk]."

We're definitely going to keep looking into cases like this. Have you seen any other similar methods online, Gadget Lab readers? If so, please send an e-mail to bchen [at] wired [dot] com.

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