Apple has published its latest App Store fraud report, and the numbers are pretty crazy. The headline figure is $2.2 billion in potentially fraudulent transactions blocked in 2025, bringing the six-year total north of $11 billion. Behind that number is a mix of automated detection and human review that’s quietly grown more sophisticated every year.
The scale of attempted account fraud alone is remarkable. Apple blocked over a billion fraudulent customer account creations, deactivated tens of millions more for abuse, and terminated nearly 200,000 developer accounts over fraud concerns. On the app side, over 9 million submissions were evaluated, with around 2 million of those rejected – including nearly 59,000 removed for bait-and-switch behavior, where apps passed review as something innocuous before updating post-approval to enable financial fraud. Hundreds of thousands more were knocked back for privacy violations or copying other apps.
Ratings manipulation got similar treatment, with close to 200 million fraudulent ones were blocked before ever appearing. The Kids category also saw thousands of rejections for failing to meet its stricter standards around age ratings and advertising.
None of this is perfect – bad apps still slip through, and the review process frustrates plenty of legitimate developers. But Apple’s sustained investment in keeping the App Store clean is one of its strengths.