Since forever, sites across the net have offered UDID activation in exchange for cash.
Say you wanted to upgrade to iOS 6 but didn’t have a Developers Account, you could pay 5 dollars to someone who had one and was ripping people off.
MacStories editor Federico Viticci reached out to a bunch of sites that used to sell UDID activations. All you have to do is Google it, they are everywhere.
Here’s what he found out:
While most of our emails bounced, we heard back from one of the site owners, who confirmed his hosting provider took down the site after a complaint for copyright infringement by Apple.
Similarly, the CEO of Fused tweeted in a reply to Andy Baio that Apple had been “fairly heavy-handed” with DMCA requests to UDID-selling sites hosted on their network.
Wired also wrote a very cool piece which exposes the underground world of UDID Activations:
For a small developer, unauthorized activations are a lucrative business that’s likely worth the risks. UDID Activation publishes their order queue on their official site, which shows more than 2,300 devices activated in the last week alone.
At $8.99 for each activation, that’s more than $20,600 in revenue, with $2,277 paid to Apple for the 23 developer accounts.
While this is something we have done in the past, (purchased, not sold) we do NOT condone this type of behavior. Rules are set up for a reason. To protect us all.
Geekfori has our own Developer account in which ONLY the writers here at Geekfori have access to.
Have you paid for this type of activation in the past? How about sold it?
