Apple: App Store Blocked $2+ Billion in Fraud in 2022

Apple says it prevented more than $2 billion in fraudulent app store transactions last year.

This record level of fraud, announced in a report from the company Tuesday (May 16), comes at a time when businesses are seeking a spike in attempts at fraudulent transactions.

According to the report, Apple “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 the company says it blocked $2.09 billion in fraudulent transactions on its App Store in 2022.

Meanwhile, Apple said its efforts to launch new methods and protocols designed to prevent the creation of fraudulent developer accounts have paid off. In 2021, the company terminated 802,000 such accounts. Last year, that number was cut nearly in half.

Apple says it also rejected nearly 1.7 million app submissions from the App Store, including ones it flagged for fraud and privacy concerns.

“In more than one case this year, App Review caught apps using malicious code with the potential to steal users’ credentials from third-party services,” the company said. “In other instances, the App Review team identified several apps that disguised themselves as innocuous financial management platforms but had the capability to morph into another app.”

This news follows reports from earlier this year that Apple was going to start providing more information about the legal basis for countries’ requests for it to remove apps from the store.

The move came in the wake of complaints by activist investors who argued the company had been secretive about why it banned some apps.

Apple’s anti-fraud actions are happening amid a surge in fraud attempts. Research by PYMNTS and The Clearing House has found that the number of attempted fraud transactions jumped by 92% between 2021 and 2022, with attempted fraud dollar amounts leapt a massive 142%.

According to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the amount of money lost to fraud last year grew more than 30% from 2021 to $8.8 billion.

“And that was just for consumers. Businesses had to account for their own variety and scale of fraud,” PYMNTS wrote earlier this month, while the total dollar cost of fraud is expected to increase in the coming years, as scams and other fraudulent crimes become more prevalent.

“It’s a continuous spectrum,” Michael Jabbara, global head of fraud services at Visa, told PYMNTS in March. Companies, he said, must “think about every interaction across multiple dimensions and think strategically about the appropriate safeguards to put in place to reduce potential incidents of fraud.”