Apple’s App Store team prevented more than $2 billion in transactions labeled as potentially fraudulent and blocked nearly 1.7 million app submissions for privacy, security, and privacy policy violations. content in 2022.

As part of its ongoing efforts to combat account fraud, the company also terminated 428,000 developer accounts for potentially fraudulent activity, disabled 282 million fraudulent customer accounts, and blocked 105 million developer account creations for suspected fraudulent activities.

The App Store team also protected Apple users from hundreds of thousands of dangerous apps last year, rejecting nearly 400,000 apps for privacy violations, such as attempting to harvest data. personal data of the user without his consent or knowledge.

Another 153,000 were rejected for misleading users and being copycats of previously submitted apps, while around 29,000 were denied access to the App Store for using undocumented features or hidden.

“In more than one case this year, App Review detected apps using malicious code that could steal user credentials from third-party services. In other cases, the App Review team identified multiple apps which disguised themselves as innocuous financial management platforms, but had the ability to morph into another application”, apple said.

“Nearly 24,000 apps were blocked or removed from the App Store for bait and switch violations like these in 2022.”

Apple added that the App Store’s app review team reviews an average of more than 100,000 app submissions per week, with about 90% reviewed within 24 hours.

Payment Fraud on the App Store in 2022

Along with blocking fraudulent transactions worth a record $2.09 billion last year, Apple also claims to have banned around 714,000 fraudulent accounts from making transactions again.

It also prevented approximately 3.9 million stolen credit cards from being used to make fraudulent purchases on the App Store.

“Apple takes credit card fraud very seriously and remains committed to protecting the App Store and its users from this type of stress,” the company said.

“For example, with Apple Pay, credit card numbers are never shared with merchants, eliminating a risk factor in the payment transaction process.”

Last but not least, Apple removed over 147 million fraudulent reviews and ratings from the App Store in 2022 after processing over a billion to detect fraudulent ones.

Apple says the App Store has more than 650 million average weekly users worldwide and provides a global app distribution platform to more than 36 million registered developers.