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Apple revealed its efforts to prevent fraudulent transactions via the App Store between 2020 and 2023 on Tuesday. The Cupertino-based tech giant highlighted the rise of digital threats and the measures it has taken to protect users from falling for scams and phishing attacks. The company said it has prevented transaction frauds in the App Store totalling $7 billion (roughly Rs. 58,440 crores) in the given period. It also blocked more than 14 million stolen credit cards, and over 3.3 million accounts from transacting again.
The details of Apple’s efforts were published by the company in a newsroom post, where it said, “As digital threats have evolved in scope and complexity over the years, Apple has expanded its antifraud initiatives to address these challenges and help protect its users. Every day, teams across Apple monitor and investigate fraudulent activity on the App Store, and utilise sophisticated tools and technologies to weed out bad actors and help strengthen the App Store ecosystem.”
Sharing more data, the tech giant said that in the year 2023, it was able to prevent frauds worth $1.8 billion (roughly Rs. 15,030 crores). Further, it rejected more than 1.7 million app submissions from the App Store for not meeting Apple’s standards around privacy, security, and content. It also terminated the accounts of roughly 374 million developers and customers and removed nearly 152 million ratings and reviews due to concerns of fraud.
Apple has also taken steps to prevent harmful activities that can take place at the customer account level. Highlighting bot accounts created to spam or manipulate ratings and reviews on the App Store, the tech giant said it blocked more than 153 such fraudulent accounts from being created and deactivated another 374 million accounts.
Explaining the process of vetting apps, the company said that its review team of 500 employees evaluate every single app around the world before they show up in the App Store. This team roughly reviews 132,500 apps a week and vetted approximately 6.9 million apps last year. The review team conducts several checks and uses a mix of automated processes and human review to detect potentially harmful and fraudulent apps.