Apple’s App Store has blocked more than $9 billion in potentially fraudulent transactions over the past five years, including over $2 billion in 2024 alone. The figures, revealed in Apple’s annual App Store fraud analysis on May 28, reflect the company’s ongoing efforts to maintain a secure marketplace for both users and developers.
Fraud prevention overview
According to the company, since its 2008 launch, the App Store has served more than 813 million weekly visitors across 175 regions. To safeguard this ecosystem, Apple employs a combination of automated systems and dedicated teams that detect and stop deceptive apps, fake reviews, and unauthorized payment schemes before they reach users.
In 2024, Apple terminated more than 146,000 developer accounts over fraud concerns and rejected 139,000 suspicious developer enrolments. On the customer side, over 711 million account creation attempts were blocked and nearly 129 million accounts deactivated for risky behaviour, such as spamming or manipulating charts and reviews. Apple also identified and prevented nearly 4.6 million attempts to install or launch unapproved apps from pirate storefronts.
App review
Apple’s App Review team evaluates both new submissions and updates, averaging 150,000 reviews per week. In 2024, the team processed over 7.7 million submissions, rejecting 1.9 million for breaches of security, privacy, or user-experience guidelines. More than 37,000 apps were removed for fraudulent activity, while an additional 43,000 submissions were denied for hidden or undocumented code. Privacy violations accounted for 400,000 rejections, and over 320,000 apps were blocked for spam, cloning, or misleading content.
To preserve fair app rankings, Apple processes every rating and review—over 1.2 billion in 2024—and removed more than 143 million fraudulent entries. The company also delisted 7,400 apps from charts and prevented nearly 9,500 deceptive apps from appearing in search results.
Payment and credit card fraud
Apple’s commerce system, which supports Apple Pay and StoreKit, uses device-specific tokens to ensure secure transactions. In 2024 alone, more than 4.7 million stolen credit cards were detected and blocked, and over 1.6 million accounts banned from further transactions. The same year, over 2 billion dollars in fraudulent transactions were thwarted.
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