It seems that in the US there have been companies specializing in posting reviews for AppStore applications for some time. These companies receive money from developers to leave favorable comments on the applications and thus increase their "quota" in the AppStore because many iPhone owners read the reviews of an application before purchasing it. Last year in the USA a set of rules was approved that forbids this kind of companies to undertake such services and Apple took action in court against a company that did this, the end result being the withdrawal of all the comments posted by that company in the AppStore.
Under the settlement, the California firm, Reverb Communications, and one of its executives, Tracie Snitker, agreed to remove all of the iTunes reviews that appeared to be written by ordinary people. The settlement also bars Reverb and Ms. Snitker from making similar endorsements of any product or service without disclosing any relevant connections. The settlement did not involve any monetary penalties.
Apple forces people who want to write a review about an application to first buy that application to avoid situations like the one presented above. To be honest, the solution seems very good to me because at the moment Apple does NOT have a system that allows testing applications and most people look at the reviews and the number of votes of an application before buying it.
