A Record $2.2 Billion in Fraudulent Transactions Blocked
Apple’s latest fraud prevention report shows just how aggressively the company is policing the App Store. In 2025, Apple says it stopped over USD 2.2 billion (approx. RM10.1 billion) in potentially fraudulent transactions, bringing the total prevented over the past six years to more than USD 11.2 billion (approx. RM51.5 billion). These blocked payments range from attempts to use stolen credit cards to purchases initiated through deceptive apps or manipulated accounts. Apple intercepted 5.4 million stolen credit cards and permanently banned nearly 2 million user accounts from conducting future transactions. This scale of activity highlights that mobile app security is under constant attack, with bad actors treating app marketplaces as a prime target for financial scams. For everyday users, these figures translate into fewer unauthorized charges and a safer environment to download apps and make in‑app purchases.
How AI and Human Review Power App Store Fraud Prevention
Behind these results is a multilayered App Store fraud prevention system that blends advanced machine learning with human expertise. Apple’s AI models scan huge volumes of activity to flag suspicious patterns, such as unusual payment behavior, app similarity suggesting clones, or abrupt changes in app functionality after updates. These automated checks then guide specialized Trust and Safety teams and App Review staff, who investigate nuanced cases algorithms alone might miss. In 2025, App Review evaluated more than 9.1 million app submissions, rejecting over 2 million that failed to meet App Store Review Guidelines. Among them were more than 1.2 million new apps and nearly 800,000 updates that raised red flags for security, quality, or policy violations. By using AI to triage and highlight risk, Apple can scale protection across a vast ecosystem while still relying on human judgment for final decisions.
Fighting Fake Accounts, Reviews, and Illegitimate Apps
Fraud on the App Store increasingly starts with fake identities and manipulated signals. In 2025, Apple’s systems rejected 1.1 billion fraudulent customer account creation attempts, stopping bot networks from taking root. The company also deactivated 40.4 million existing customer accounts linked to fraud or abuse, including efforts to spam users, manipulate charts, or flood the store with fake app reviews. Out of 1.3 billion ratings and reviews processed, nearly 195 million were filtered out as fraudulent, helping keep rankings more trustworthy. Apple is also targeting activity beyond the official storefront, detecting and blocking 28,000 illegitimate apps on pirate marketplaces and preventing 2.9 million recent attempts to install or launch software distributed outside the App Store or approved alternative marketplaces. Together, these measures aim to limit the influence of fake app accounts and deceptive content that can mislead users and distort competition.
Protecting Users While Supporting Legitimate Developers
Apple frames its App Store security measures as essential not only for user safety but also for developer trust. By keeping out bad actors, the company says it preserves a level playing field for the more than 306,000 new legitimate developers who joined the platform in 2025, and for the broader ecosystem that welcomes over 850 million weekly visitors. Enforcement is robust: Apple terminated 193,000 developer accounts over fraud concerns and rejected more than 138,000 new developer enrollments it deemed suspicious. App Review also removed nearly 59,000 apps for bait‑and‑switch behavior, where seemingly harmless utilities later morphed into tools for financial fraud, and blocked over 443,000 submissions for privacy violations. While some enforcement actions are being challenged, these steps underline growing pressure on platform owners to maintain strong mobile app security, protect user data, and ensure honest discovery and monetization for legitimate developers.