There are more than 1.5 billion iPhone users globally, and every one of them uses Apple’s App Store. With numbers like that, it is easy to see why it is a prime target for fraudsters and scammers.
To show just how intense this battle has become, the iPhone maker recently shared some data about their app store from 2025 and the numbers are pretty staggering. Apple managed to block over USD2.2 billion in potentially fraudulent transactions last year alone, which pushes their six-year total to a massive USD11.2 billion. On top of that, they stopped the misuse of over 5.4 million stolen credit cards and banned nearly 2 million user accounts from making any future purchases.
Reviewing the sheer volume of apps coming through the door is a massive hurdle in itself. Out of 9.1 million submissions last year, Apple rejected more than 2 million problematic apps to keep malware and dodgy software off our devices.
Account fraud has also become a massive headache, especially now that scammers are deploying bot networks. These bots are designed to churn out fake accounts, spam users, rig chart rankings, and leave fake reviews. Apple’s trust and safety teams had to shut down multiple large-scale bot attacks last year, ultimately blocking over 1.1 billion fraudulent customer accounts from being created and deactivating another 40.4 million for outright abuse.
They did not play nice with shady developers either, terminating 193,000 developer accounts and rejecting 138,000 risky enrollments. They even hunted down and blocked 28,000 illegitimate apps floating around on pirate storefronts outside their official ecosystem.
Finally, there is the ongoing battle in the review section, where fraudsters try to artificially inflate ratings. Apple has been using a mix of artificial intelligence and human reviewers to spot these fakes. Out of the 1.3 billion ratings and reviews processed in 2025, they wiped out nearly 195 million suspicious reviews and caught around 7,800 deceptive apps before they could even pop up in your search results.