Apple ‘s annual fraud prevention report for 2025 paints a striking picture of just how much effort goes into keeping the App Store clean. The numbers are significant: more than two million app submissions rejected, over a billion fake account creations stopped, and billions of dollars in fraudulent transactions prevented. Behind all of it sits a combination of artificial intelligence and human review that Apple has been quietly refining for years.
The scale of the problem is easy to underestimate. Every week, more than 850 million people visit the App Store across 175 storefronts worldwide. That kind of traffic attracts bad actors constantly, developers trying to slip malicious or deceptive apps through the review process, fraudsters creating fake accounts to manipulate charts and reviews, and criminals using stolen payment credentials to push through unauthorized purchases.
In 2025 alone, Apple’s systems processed over 9.1 million app submissions. Of those, more than 1.2 million new apps and roughly 800,000 updates were rejected before reaching users. The reasons ranged from bait-and-switch tactics and hidden features to cloned apps, spam submissions, and outright policy violations. AI has become central to catching these patterns faster and at a scale no human team could manage alone.
“In 2025, Apple’s Trust and Safety teams stopped multiple large-scale attempts to create fraudulent accounts. Last year, Apple’s systems also successfully rejected 1.1 billion fraudulent customer account creations — blocking bad actors at the outset — and deactivated an additional 40.4 million customer accounts for fraud and abuse.” reads the report published by the company. ” In 2025, Apple terminated 193,000 developer accounts over fraud concerns and rejected more than 138,000 developer enrollments.”
On the developer side, the company terminated 193,000 accounts over fraud concerns and rejected more than 138,000 enrollment attempts from bad actors trying to enter the ecosystem in the first place.
The financial dimension is equally notable. Apple says it prevented more than $2.2 billion in potentially fraudulent transactions in 2025. Over the past six years, that cumulative figure has crossed $11 billion.
“Apple prevented more than $2.2 billion in fraudulent transactions, stopped more than 5.4 million stolen credit cards from being used to make fraudulent purchases, and banned nearly 2 million user accounts from transacting again.” continues the report.
Beyond account and payment fraud, Apple is also fighting a less visible battle against pirate app distribution. In 2025, the company detected and blocked 28,000 illegitimate apps on unauthorized storefronts distributing malware, pirated software, and other harmful content. It also blocked 2.9 million attempts in a single month alone to install or launch apps distributed outside the App Store or approved alternative marketplaces.
Of the 1.3 billion ratings and reviews submitted last year, nearly 195 million were flagged and removed as fraudulent, fake reviews designed to artificially boost or bury apps.
What makes this report worth reading is not just the numbers. It is the reminder that app marketplaces are not neutral platforms. They require constant, active enforcement to remain trustworthy. The combination of machine learning and human expertise Apple describes is not a new idea, but the scale at which it now operates is genuinely impressive. Every rejected app or blocked account represents a threat that never reached an end user — and that, more than any headline figure, is the real measure of the system working.
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(SecurityAffairs – hacking, App Store)
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