Apple has released new data showing the scale of its ongoing fight against fraud in the App Store. The company blocked more than $2.2 billion in potentially fraudulent transactions during 2025, contributing to a six year total of over $11 billion in prevented fraud. This effort involved rejecting more than 2 million problematic app submissions and shutting down over 1.1 billion fraudulent account creations.
How Apple Detects and Prevents Fraud
Apple uses a combination of human review and machine learning to identify suspicious activity. Its systems stopped more than 5.4 million stolen credit cards from being used and banned nearly 2 million user accounts last year. The App Review team evaluated over 9.1 million app submissions, rejecting more than 443,000 for privacy violations and over 371,000 for being misleading or copycat apps. Nearly 59,000 apps were removed for bait and switch tactics, roughly triple the number removed in 2024.
Impact and Scope of App Store Security
Beyond app submissions, Apple processed over 1.3 billion ratings and reviews, blocking nearly 195 million fraudulent reviews. The company also prevented nearly 7,800 deceptive apps from appearing in search results and blocked 11,500 from App Store charts. Additionally, 28,000 illegitimate apps on pirate storefronts were detected and blocked. Apple terminated 193,000 developer accounts over fraud concerns and deactivated 40.4 million customer accounts suspected of abuse. The App Store now has over 850 million weekly visitors across 175 storefronts worldwide.
Source: BleepingComputer
