The game Flappy Bird was No. 1 in the U.S. iOS store by mid-January and downloaded about 50 million times until it was taken down by the game's Vietnamese developer, Dong Nguyen on Feb. 8. No one is entirely sure what truly happened, although some familiar with the industry are making some suggestions about what may have happened to cause the developer, who was reportedly making $50,000 a day from in-game ads, to take it down all of a sudden at the height of the game's popularity.

One app developer Carter Thomas said: "I have seen a lot of shady stuff in the app store and this is textbook. Essentially people will create cloak IP addresses and automate hundreds of thousands of Apple ID accounts on virtual devices that download an app millions of times. Because chart ranking is primarily driven by download volume, the app goes to the top of the charts. Then it enjoys all the organic volume that that chart position gets."

There is some merit to this, as the Flappy Bird game, which borrowed the pipes from Nintendo's Super Mario Bros., first appeared in Apple's iOS store on May 24, 2013 in the Family category but didn't get any attention until it just recently went viral

In the aftermath of the takedown, users with the app downloaded on their device tried to sell them in online auction websites and scammers have created fake versions to exploit the users who mistakenly download them, thinking it was the real game which in fact had already been made unavailable. Many of the fake apps designed to dupe users can be found on Google's Android store which either contain harmful software or entice users to send premium rate text messages.

Trend Micro Blog reports: "All of the fake versions we've seen so far are premium service abusers -- apps that send messages to premium numbers, thus causing unwanted charges to victims' phone billing statements. The fake Flappy Bird app asks for the additional read/send text messages permissions during installation -- one that is not required in the original version. Apart from premium service abuse, the app also poses a risk of information leakage for the user since it sends out the phone number, carrier, Gmail address registered in the device."