Ask HN: iOS App Developers, any unnatural app downloads recently?

My company makes iOS apps and games. Yesterday I received an email from Apple telling that they're terminating our account in 30 days for breaching the agreement by trying to manipulate the app ranking. I promptly checked the trends and saw that one of our games got 17k and 18k downloads from the UK only in two dates (19 - 20 Jan, 2022). All users downloaded the game from the App Store Search page. On usual days, the game only gets 200-300 downloads globally, and 15-20 downloads from the UK.

Apple wants us to find the issue, mitigate it and ensure that does not happen before they can look into the case. We don't know how that happened, and we don't see anything abnormal in other stats. The game is basically a driver's license exam simulation game. Did anyone in the UK notice some media coverage or news about such a game? Did anyone else got unnatural downloads on those dates because Apple accidentally messed up their algorithm on those dates and our app got ranked higher? Any hint would help us keep our business running - we're bootstrapped, and only publish in-house mobile games and apps, so we don't really have anyone at Apple to ask what went wrong.

I have been reading scary stories from developers whose accounts got closed by Google and Apple every now and then. In my case, it's not a life ending situation because we also publish on Google Play. But still I'm curious if the App Store Search went nuts for everyone else or just me. Thank you for reading this far. :)