Apple reins in its App Store with 813 million weekly visitors to curb fraud. So far, the company has cancelled more than 146,000 developer accounts and removed more than 37,000 applications for fraudulent activity in 2024 as part of its security efforts to protect users of the App Store, which in the past five years have helped to prevent fraudulent transactions worth more than 9 billion dollars.

Apple has highlighted the security of its application store, the App Store, in which it assures that it “employs a comprehensive approach to combat fraud”, coordinating different teams within the company to “detect, investigate and prevent malicious activities.” These threats range from deceptive apps designed to steal personal information to fraudulent payment schemes that attempt to exploit users,” the business explains.

The App Store faces more than just fraud-related challenges, as it is currently under investigation by Spanish authorities over alleged anticompetitive practices. At the same time, the European Commission is scrutinising Apple for potential breaches of the Digital Markets Act (DMA).

Apple deactivates 129 million accounts

In regard to customer accounts, from which cybercriminals take advantage to carry out malicious activities, such as spam or the manipulation of ratings, reviews, charts and search results, Apple states that last year it rejected more than 711 million customer App Store account creations and deactivated nearly 129 million.

Apple also detected and blocked more than 10,000 illegitimate applications in pirate stores, including malware, pornography applications, gambling applications and pirated versions of legitimate applications from the App Store.

During the last month, it stopped nearly 4.6 million attempts to install or execute applications distributed illicitly outside the App Store or from third-party markets approved by Apple.

Strict review process

To be published on the App Store, applications undergo a review process to ensure that they “meet Apple’s quality and safety standards”, in which both human personnel and automated systems intervene. Each week, the review process deals with around 150,000 applications on average. Over the course of last year, 7.7 million applications were reviewed, of which more than 1.9 million were rejected, and over 37,000 were removed due to fraudulent activity.

The company has reviewed the attempts made by cybercriminals to publish their fraudulent and malicious applications on the App Store, which include hiding functions and features and passing off potentially dangerous programmes as harmless applications. Moreover, to avoid scams, the company also helps inform the public on how to recognise and avoid social engineering schemes, including phishing messages, fraudulent support calls, and other scams.

Removing fraudulent ratings and reviews

The discovered fraud ranges from applications that manipulate the App Store’s systems to improve their position to automated or paid services that artificially inflate the number of downloads of an application or post fake reviews. In this regard, Apple processed 1.2 billion ratings and reviews last year and removed 143 million fraudulent ratings and reviews. It also removed 7,400 potentially fraudulent applications from the App Store’s listings and 9,500 misleading applications from search results.

Lastly, with regard to payment and card fraud, just in 2024, the App Store’s security measures prevented more than US$2 billion in fraudulent transactions. They also prevented US$4.7 million stolen bank cards from being used and blocked the possibility of conducting transactions in more than 1.6 million accounts.