$7B in attempted App Store fraud blocked by Apple, says the company

Apple is continuing its PR offensive to promote the official App Store as the safest place to buy iPhone apps, after antitrust cases forced it to open up its platform to competition. It said that it has blocked more than $7B’s worth of attempted App Store fraud.

The company says that the “potentially fraudulent transactions” were detected and blocked over a four-year period from 2020 to 2023 …

Apple facing competition in both US and Europe

Apple is facing new competition for sales of apps and in-app purchases thanks to a combination of a court ruling in the US, and new legislation in Europe.

In the US, developers are now allowed to direct users to external sites to purchase subscriptions and in-app content. Apple is currently continuing to charge them a 27% commission on sales made outside of the App Store, though the judge doesn’t appear too impressed by this!

In Europe, Apple is obliged to allow third-party app stores, though again with some controversial small-print, the legality of which is under investigation.

$7B in attempted App Store fraud blocked

Apple said that digital threats have increased in both scale and sophistication in recent years, and that it has responded by using a growing range of tools to weed out bad actors.

As published in its fourth annual fraud prevention analysis released today, Apple found that in 2023, it rejected more than 1.7 million app submissions for failing to meet the App Store’s stringent standards for privacy, security, and content. In addition, Apple’s persistent efforts to stop and reduce fraud on the App Store resulted in the termination of nearly 374 million developer and customer accounts, and removal of close to 152 million ratings and reviews over fraud concerns […]

From 2020 through 2023, Apple prevented a combined total of over $7 billion in potentially fraudulent transactions, including more than $1.8 billion in 2023 alone. In the same period, Apple blocked over 14 million stolen credit cards and more than 3.3 million accounts from transacting again.

It says it has also gotten better at preventing the creation of potentially fraudulent developer accounts in the first place.

The customer accounts closed were mostly bots created to spam apps and create fake reviews.

Each person reviews 50 apps per day

The company also gave some insight as to how some multi-million dollar scam apps still make it through app review, revealing that it has a team of around 500 people to review an average of 132,500 apps per week. That would mean each person reviewing around 50 apps per day.

Card fraud checks

Apple said that it uses a mix of human and automated checks to detect card fraud.

When consumers use Apple Pay to make a purchase online or in-app, cards with certain enhanced fraud prevention will enable a consumer’s device to evaluate information — such as their Apple ID, device, and location if they have Location Services for Wallet turned on — in order to develop on-device fraud prevention assessments.

Apple also leverages a combination of advanced technology and human review to detect when a stolen credit card is being used for illicit purposes. In 2023 alone, Apple prevented more than 3.5 million stolen credit cards from being used to make fraudulent purchases and banned over 1.1 million accounts from transacting again.

Image: Apple and 9to5Mac