We updated our app with a new feature (video generation) and we also offer IAP to purchase tokens to generate videos. We sent it to review in App Store Connect.
Besides us, no one else had access to this feature.
Today, our app went to review. Suddenly, we saw a huge increase in API requests over many hours which has costs us around $200+ (video generation is expensive).
The only person who had access to this feature was the person who reviewed the app. I am not talking about making 3-4 requests to test the app or its functions/features. I am talking about 60-70 requests to make videos over the duration of a couple of hours.
This person used test-purchases to get tokens and then used these tokens to generate videos for his own good. This wasn't just a review or testing. This was abuse.
In the backend, we can see it all has been done by one person, and the only person who had access to this feature was the app reviewer.
The only reason it stopped was because we saw the abuse and disabled the feature. Just 5 minutes after disabling the feature, our app update was approved & ready for distribution.
What is going on? Could someone from Apple escalate this situation?
Topic:
App Store Distribution & Marketing
SubTopic:
App Review