Apple has revealed the staggering scale of its ongoing battle against App Store fraud, announcing that it prevented over $9 billion in fraudulent transactions during the past five years, with $2 billion blocked in 2024 alone. The disclosure highlights the escalating threats facing mobile app ecosystems and the extensive measures required to protect users from increasingly sophisticated scams.
The tech giant confronts 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.” This comprehensive threat landscape requires Apple to deploy multiple layers of security screening and ongoing monitoring to maintain platform integrity.
Apple terminated more than 46,000 developer accounts over fraud concerns and rejected an additional 139,000 developer enrollment applications as part of efforts to prevent bad actors from submitting their apps to the App Store. The company’s proactive approach extends beyond individual apps to target the accounts and infrastructure used by malicious actors.
The scope of Apple’s security operations in 2024 reveals the massive scale of attempted fraud across its platform. The company 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.
Apple’s enforcement efforts targeted various forms of deceptive practices throughout 2024. The company rejected more than 1.9 million App Store submissions for failing to meet its standards for security, reliability, privacy violations, or fraud concerns, while removing more than 37,000 apps for fraudulent activity and rejecting over 43,000 app submissions for containing hidden or undocumented features.
The financial fraud detection capabilities proved particularly effective, with Apple identifying nearly 4.7 million stolen credit cards and banning over 1.6 million accounts from transacting again. These measures directly protected users from financial losses while disrupting criminal payment schemes.
Apple’s fraud prevention efforts showed steady growth, with the company preventing more than $1.8 billion in potentially fraudulent transactions in 2023 and over $2 billion in potentially fraudulent transactions in 2022. The increasing dollar amounts reflect both the growing sophistication of fraud attempts and Apple’s enhanced detection capabilities.
The disclosure comes as Apple faces mounting regulatory pressure over its App Store policies, with recent court rulings requiring the company to allow iOS apps to direct customers to external payment options. Despite these policy challenges, Apple’s security statistics demonstrate the ongoing necessity of robust platform security measures in protecting users from the evolving threat landscape targeting mobile ecosystems.