Apple’s App Store team prevented more than $2 billion in transactions tagged as potentially fraudulent and blocked almost 1.7 million app submissions for privacy, security, and content policy violations in 2022.
As part of its ongoing efforts to fend off account fraud, the company also terminated 428,000 developer accounts for potentially fraudulent activity, deactivated 282 million fraudulent customer accounts, and blocked 105 million developer account creations for suspected fraudulent activities.
The App Store team also protected Apple users from hundreds of thousands of unsafe apps last year, rejecting almost 400,000 apps for privacy violations such as trying to harvest the user’s personal data without their consent or knowledge.
Another 153,000 were rejected for misleading users and being copycats of already submitted apps, while around 29,000 were denied entry into the App Store for using undocumented or hidden features.
“In more than one case this year, App Review caught apps using malicious code with the potential to steal users’ credentials from third-party services. In other instances, the App Review team identified several apps that disguised themselves as innocuous financial management platforms but had the capability to morph into another app,” Apple said.
“Nearly 24,000 apps were blocked or removed from the App Store for bait-and-switch violations such as these in 2022.”
Apple added that the App Store App Review team examines an average of over 100,000 app submissions weekly, with approximately 90% of them under review within 24 hours.
App Store payment fraud in 2022
With blocking fraudulent transactions worth a record $2.09 billion last year, Apple also says it banned roughly 714,000 fraudulent accounts from transacting again.
It also blocked approximately 3.9 million stolen credit cards from being used to make fraudulent purchases on the App Store.
“Apple takes credit card fraud extremely seriously, and remains committed to protecting the App Store and its users from this kind of stress,” the company said.
“For example, with Apple Pay, credit card numbers are never shared with merchants, thus eliminating a risk factor in the payment transaction process.”
Last but not least, Apple removed over 147 million fraudulent reviews and ratings from the App Store in 2022 after processing more than 1 billion to detect the fraudulent ones.
Apple says the App Store has over 650 million average weekly users worldwide and offers a global app distribution platform for more than 36 million registered developers.