Apple Blocks $9 Billion in Fraud Over 5 Years Amid Rising App Store Threats

Apple on Tuesday revealed that it prevented over $9 billion in fraudulent transactions in the last five years, including more than $2 billion in 2024 alone.

The company said the App Store is confronted by a wide range of threats that seek to defraud users in various ways, ranging from “deceptive apps designed to steal personal information to fraudulent payment schemes that attempt to exploit users.”

The tech giant said it terminated more than 46,000 developer accounts over fraud concerns and rejected an additional 139,000 developer enrollment as part of efforts to prevent bad actors from submitting their apps to the App Store.

Furthermore, the company said it rejected over 711 million customer account creations and deactivated nearly 129 million customer accounts last year with an aim to block these accounts from conducting nefarious activity, such as spamming or manipulating ratings and reviews, charts, and search results that could compromise the integrity of the App Store.

Some of the other noteworthy statistics shared by Apple for 2024 are listed below –

• Detected and blocked more than 10,000 illegitimate apps on pirate storefronts, which include malware, pornography apps, gambling apps, and pirated versions of legitimate apps from the App Store
• Stopped nearly 4.6 million attempts to install or launch apps distributed illicitly outside the App Store or approved third-party marketplaces
• Rejected more than 1.9 million App Store submissions for failing to meet its standards for security, reliability, privacy violations, or fraud concerns
• Removed more than 37,000 apps for fraudulent activity and rejected over 43,000 app submissions for containing hidden or undocumented features
• Rejected over 320,000 submissions that copied other apps, were found to be spam, or otherwise misled users, and another 400,000 app submissions for privacy violations.
• Removed more than 7,400 potentially fraudulent apps from App Store charts and nearly 9,500 deceptive apps from appearing in App Store search results
• Removed more than 143 million fraudulent ratings and reviews from the App Store
• Identified nearly 4.7 million stolen credit cards and banned over 1.6 million accounts from transacting again

In comparison, Apple said it prevented more than $1.8 billion in potentially fraudulent transactions in 2023 and over $2 billion in potentially fraudulent transactions in 2022. In 2023, Apple terminated close to 118,000 developer accounts.

The disclosure follows a similar report from Google earlier this year that it blocked over 2.36 million policy-violating Android apps from being published to the Google Play app marketplace in 2024 and banned more than 158,000 bad developer accounts that attempted to publish such harmful apps.

Apple’s annual App Store fraud analysis also comes at a time when the company is facing increasing scrutiny over its App Store policies. A recent ruling in the United States ordered the iPhone maker to allow iOS apps to show links or buttons that direct customers to make purchases outside of the ‌App Store.

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Some parts of this article are sourced from:
thehackernews.com