It had to happen! With such promises of riches from app downloads, it looks like companies are engineering reviews in their favour.

Mobilecrunch reports that a PR firm representing a number of apps and games companies has been hiring interns to trawl itunes and give their client’s apps five star reviews. How did they find this out? Well the PR company described the process they use in their corporate literature.

Fortunately for app store users, they can see all the reviews submitted by each person, so blatant ‘app fluffing’ can be seen. However, as people get wise to that, it wouldn’t surprise me if they just use more reviewers with fewer entries.

As I suggested a few weeks ago, a combination of Apple’s own submission/acceptance policies and review engineering may see the end of the goldrush for the App Store.