Apple Thwarts $7 Billion in Fraudulent Transactions, Terminates 374M Developer Accounts

Tech giant Apple just shed light on some massive gains that it made in 2023 regarding security and protection against possible fraud attempts.

The Cupertino firm revealed in its latest yearly fraud prevention analysis how one of its biggest highlights of the year had to do with terminating fraud accounts belonging to developers. And they went as far as the 374M mark.

The company has also spoken highly of itself in terms of blocking suspicious activity carried out on the App Store and other iOS platforms including fake reviews, frauds done via payments, and stolen credentials of users.

Through a recently published blog post, the tech giant added how 118k accounts belonging to developers were removed while 91k fraud accounts were blocked from functioning and coming into play. But we have to mention that’s a major drop from what was seen by the company in the period before this where figures went as high as 428k.

Apple says some of those accounts removed were linked to bots and were designed to wreak havoc by promoting spam online or even generating fake reviews and ratings throughout its App Store.

As far as fraud transactions are concerned, the company mentioned how it stopped over $7 billion such financial dealings from taking place between 2020 and 2023. During this time, it blocked more than 3.3 million accounts from making transactions again while restricting close to 14 million credit cards that were stolen.
Close to $1.8 billion of such transactions were rolled out alone last year. This is where the tech noted that millions of apps in the Apple ecosystem were using tech like StoreKit or even Apple Pay to enable sales of products and services on this App Store. Today, the company has close to 500 experts who carry out reviews for hundreds of thousands of apps each week.

It’s not easy as both human power and a mix of modern automated means are used to combat apps designed to cause harm. As a whole, Apple reviewed nearly 7 million apps last year and rejected close to 1.7 due to fraud activities and violating privacy. Moreover, those given the boot from the App Store were misrepresented as photo editors or games but in reality, they were predatory in nature.

Apple was left with no choice but to purge 152 million ratings linked to fraud with reviews hitting the one billion mark for 2023. Reviews on the App Store are hinting at whether or not a platform should be worth your time and whether or not you’d be wasting time on it.

The latest figures show how the tech giant was left with no choice but to obey the EU in regards to allowing users with iPhones to install apps found external to the App Store. This meant saying hello to places where third parties function and webpages where developers can be found.

But that’s not all as we are soon to see these changes arrive at other Apple devices such as the iPad that would be during the latter part of this year. This means developers would be charged with a new CTF fee that not many are looking forward to this year.

Apple did roll out features such as notarization for platforms recently but it emphasized that app distribution done external to its App Store brings about huge risks for Apple users around the globe.




Read next: New Google Play Feature Can Alert Users About Phone Hacking Before They Notice
Previous Post Next Post