Apple promises to continue to proceed against app scams. The App Store now has over 800 million visitors a week, as the company announced on Tuesday. The much -used platform also remains a popular destination for fraudsters. “These threats range from fraudulent apps that aim to steal personal data, to fraudulent payment systems that try to use users: Apple explained And promises a “comprehensive approach to fight against fraud”.
Fraud in and outside of apps
The SCAMs include account scams, malignant apps, manipulated app charts and fake ratings as well as credit card fraud. According to Apple’s numbers, mainly fraudulent user accounts remain a problem that leave fake reviews or artificially raise the download numbers of apps in order to bring them more visibility in the charts.
The app store operator therefore in 2024 “over 711 million accounts from customers: rejected and deactivated almost 129 million customer accounts” in order to prevent such harmful actions. Several thousand apps flew from the app store charts and apparently manipulated search results. Apple has also classified around every ninth new rating as fraudulent. A total of 143 million reviews and reviews were removed.
From 7.7 million apps and updates submitted to the app store test last year, Apple said more than 1.9 million. 146,000 developer accounts were “dissolved due to suspected fraud”. Another 139,000 registrations of new accounts were rejected. In addition, Apple threw 37,000 apps from the App Store “due to fraudulent activities”.
Apps apparently move from Apple’s payment systems
According to Apple, only 420,000 apps are now using the manufacturer’s payment systems (Apple Pay and Storekit or in-app prurse). Why this number has halved compared to the previous year remains unclear – last year Apple spoke of “almost 1 million apps”. According to the information, Apple has blocked 4.7 million stolen credit card data in its own payment systems and 1.6 million “blocked accounts for further transactions”. The company indicated that this “potentially fraudulent transactions” of a good $ 2 billion. No more information about the number was given.
Apple also announced that he had blocked “over 10,000 illegal apps on pirate websites”. In the past month alone, the company also prevented “almost 4.6 million attempts to install or start apps that have been illegally distributed outside the App Store or approved third-party marketplaces”. However, no more details were published for this.
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