The App Store has prevented more than $10 billion ($US7 billion) worth of potentially fraudulent transactions and blocked 14 million stolen credit cards between 2020 and 2023 using industry leading technologies.
Apple revealed in its fourth annual Fraud Prevention Analysis Report that he had rejected more than 1.7 million app submissions which failed to meet the App Store’s high standards for privacy security and content.
Apple’s investment in anti-fraud technologies since the store opened in 2008 was to ensure a safe and secure experience for customers downloading apps.
In recent years, the company has expanded its security initiatives to address the growing number of scams and fraudulent activity.
Teams across Apple investigate this illegal activity on the App Store to find and weed out these people and strengthen the App Store ecosystem.
Apple’s determination to reduce fraud on the App Store saw nearly 374 million developer and customer accounts terminated along with the removal of around 152 million ratings and reviews over fraud concerns.
Apps are now used for everything from purchasing food and entertainment services to household goods and Apple has doubled down on its mission to protect users financial information using secure payment technologies like Apple Pay and Store Kit.
As a result, Apple has helped prevent more than $US1.8 billion in potentially fraudulent transactions in 2023 alone.
Apple also uses a combination of technology and human review to identify when a stolen credit card is being used.
In 2023, Apple prevented more than 3.5 million stolen credit cards from being used to make fraudulent purchases and banned more than 1.1 million accounts from making purchases again.
Apple has also been diligent at the account level to prevent fraudulent developers scamming users.
Last year, Apple terminated more than 118,000 developer accounts which is actually a drop from the 428,000 terminations in 2022 thanks to the improvements in fraud prevention.
Apple has also taken measures at the consumer account level with these accounts which are usually bots created to spam or manipulate ratings and reviews.
Apple has a team of more than 500 experts who evaluate every single app submitted to the App Store from developers around the world.
The team reviews about 132,000 apps on average per week and in 2023 reviewed nearly 6.9 million app submissions while helping 192,000 developers publish their very first app onto the App Store.
Malicious developers have been known to design apps whose sole purpose is to trick and scam users.
Last year, more than 248,000 app submissions were rejected from the App Store because they went against Apple’s policies on spam, copying other apps and misleading users.
And this is on top of the more than 38,000 app submissions rejected because they had hidden or undocumented features.