In its fifth annual fraud prevention report, Apple said its App Store platform has prevented more than $9 billion in potentially fraudulent transactions over the past five years, including over $2 billion in 2024 alone. Besides that, nearly 2 million apps were blocked from listing in App Store in the same year.
Apple’s 2024 Fraud Prevention Report
The company says it blocked over 1.9 million among 7.7 million submissions in 2024 for failing to meet App Store standards – these include over 400,000 for privacy concerns and 320,000 for misleading or spam-like behavior. The company also removed more than 37,000 apps for fraudulent activity and rejected over 43,000 submissions that contained hidden or undocumented features.
Apple also terminated over 146,000 developer accounts for fraud in 2024 and rejected 139,000 developer enrollments. Nearly 129 million customer accounts were deactivated and 711 million account creation attempts were blocked to prevent fraudulent activity, such as artificially-boosted app ratings and fake reviews.
In efforts to secure the platform beyond the App Store, Apple blocked over 10,000 illegitimate apps hosted on pirate storefronts and stopped 4.6 million attempts to install unauthorized software. Within its discovery systems, 143 million fraudulent ratings and reviews from the App Store had been removed, in addition to removing over 7,400 apps from App Store charts and 9,500 deceptive apps from search results.
In terms of financial fraud prevention, the company identified 4.7 million stolen credit cards and banned over 1.6 million associated accounts, accounting for over $2 billion in fraudulent transactions. As a security measure, purchases made on Apple Pay are done with unique transaction codes and device-specific numbers used instead of actual card data, which is neither stored nor shared with developers.
Pokdepinion: Good to see lots of efforts being done on Apple’s part to keep the marketplace safe for everyone.
