William Gallagher
An unknown but large number of Apple users were mistakenly sent emails about iTunes Connect billing or banking details — even if they are not iTunes Connect users.
Over a span of a few hours on July 27, 2022, the incorrect iTunes Connect emails were sent out en masse. All users who received one should then have also received an apology, but AppleInsider staff have seen inconsistencies, with different accounts getting apologies from those that got the error.
In the emails sent to AppleInsider, the iTunes Connect warning concerned banking details. Users were being told that they had to update their banking details in order to get payments from iTunes Connect.
It's not possible to unknowingly become an iTunes Connect user, even though the service is free. Authors, musicians and developers sign up for iTunes Connect in order to distribute their works across Apple Music, Apple Books, and the App Store.
Looks like I've become a musician overnight - and iTunes Connect knew it first.
— Felix Schwarz (@felix_schwarz) July 28, 2022
Going by the headers the email was sent by Apple's servers. But since App Store Connect shows no issues with my banking details and many others got the mail too, it looks like a technical error. pic.twitter.com/SGgWNzdtCY
The emails were clearly a mistake and Apple has at least attempted to apologize to everyone who got one, sometimes before the original email asking for banking information arrived. But the fact that an iTunes Connect warning went out even to people who may never have heard of iTunes Connect, is more serious.
As the AppleInsider feature on how to make ebooks on a Mac showed, some of Apple's back-end systems can be an ancient mishmash. They run on elements culled from different firms Apple has acquired, and seemingly have seen little further development in many years.
Charles Martin
Malcolm Owen
Christine McKee
Wesley Hilliard
6 Comments
I got one on my day job dev appleID. I’m listed as an admin type user for dev issues but not as a financial user for the Corp account.
ETA: just noticed they were signed Apple Music at the bottom. I had stopped reading them half way through. Our dev accounts have never been associated with Apple Music. Someone screwed up sending something out.
I got one to email never used as apple id primary. Perhaps as a backup, I can't remember. As soon as it said "banking"
alarms went off. But the urls looked legit.
Tried apple support - totally clueless.
No apology yet, even though submitted to reportphishing@apple.com
As someone who occasionally writes scripts that emails users (either automated or semi-automated) I’m surprised stuff like this doesn’t happen more often. I guarantee you someone was writing a script or using a delivered process in a test environment and they forgot to comment out the line of code (or uncheck a box etc) that actually sends the emails!