China is arguably the most difficult market in the world to sell legitimate digital music downloads. This is largely due to Baidu’s free mp3 search that dominates the market and generates huge profits for the Chinese search engine. However, there is one group of people who are making a decent living off digital downloads by hacking Apple’s iTunes gift vouchers.
Ulysses Shi from music industry consultancy Outdustry writes that on Taobao, China’s biggest C2C online shopping site, $200 iTunes gift cards are on sale for 17.9 RMB, roughly $2.60. Gift card codes are created by hackers using key-generators and transferred via Taobao’s Instant Messenger chat system. While the price was 320 RMB six months ago, the competition has intensified with thousands of gift cards now available, pushing the price down to 18 RMB per card.
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Good thing PSFK podcasts are free.
March 10th, 2009 at 8:45 pm
Why is Apple not saying anything about this. Evidently, this practice has been going on for a while, and you can find lots of deeply discounted iTunes gift cards on eBay. It is either Apple is deeply discounting iTunes cards on third party sites or they have simply refused to put the fraudsters out of business. For more on this, see my blog post on this issue here – http://blog.giftcardrescue.com/stolen-itunes-gift-card-codes-sold-online/
March 12th, 2009 at 9:40 am