Apple has announced that it prevented over $2 billion in potentially fraudulent transactions and rejected roughly 1.7 million app submissions for privacy and security violations in 2022.
The company further terminated 428,000 developer accounts for potential fraudulent activity, blocked 105,000 fake developer account creations, and deactivated 282 million bogus customer accounts. It also thwarted 198 million attempted fraudulent new accounts prior to their creation. The company attributed the decrease in developer accounts being booted out to new methods and protocols that prevent the creation of such accounts in the first place.
Apple highlighted that it blocked nearly 3.9 million stolen credit cards from being used to make fraudulent purchases, and banned 714,000 accounts from transacting again. In all, $2.09 billion in fraudulent transactions on the App Store were blocked in 2022.
These numbers are in line with the recent report from Google that dismantled 173,000 bad accounts and blocked 1.43 million harmful apps from being published to the Play Store in 2022, fending off more than $2 billion in fraudulent and abusive transactions.
Although threat actors have found a variety of ways to bypass security protections and publish their apps on the official app stores, Apple and Google will continue to develop new approaches and tools designed to prevent fraud from harming App Store users and developers.