Apple’s Annual App Store Scam and Fraud Report

Apple Newsroom, yesterday:

Apple’s strong antifraud infrastructure helps ensure that malicious developer and customer accounts are swiftly flagged and eliminated. In 2024, Apple terminated more than 146,000 developer accounts over fraud concerns and rejected an additional 139,000 developer enrollments, preventing bad actors from submitting their apps to the App Store in the first place.

Apple also rejected over 711 million customer account creations and deactivated nearly 129 million customer accounts last year, blocking these risky and malicious accounts from carrying out nefarious activity. That includes spamming or manipulating ratings and reviews, charts, and search results that risk compromising the integrity of the App Store.

This report isn’t something new that Apple is doing in the face of increased regulatory scrutiny over the exclusivity of the App Store — they’ve been issuing these reports since 2021. Nick Heer has a good post at Pixel Envy documenting how some of their numbers are seemingly all over the place, year to year.

What some App Store critics argue is that if any substantial amount of fraud, scams, or rip-offs occur through apps distributed through the App Store, that proves that there are no protective benefits of the App Store model. That’s nonsense. There are high-crime cities and low-crime cities, but there exist zero no-crime cities. The question is whether Apple is catching most — or even just “enough” — scammers. Scammy apps, pirated apps, fraudulent app reviewers. You name it. I’ve long suggested that Apple ought to employ a “bunco squad” to crack down on scammers, focusing first and foremost on successful ones. Better to catch one scam with 1,000 victims than 10 scams with one victim each.

I think they could still do better, but I actually think Apple has been doing a better job on this front in recent years. But if your measuring stick is “Are there any successful scams at all in the App Store?” there’s no way Apple is ever going to pass muster. And I think a lot of App Store critics are vastly, vastly underestimating how much fraud Apple is currently stopping that would sail right through if iOS adopted a Mac-style of software distribution. The main difference is that iOS is so much more of a juicy target than MacOS. The other is that I think many people underestimate how many software scams there are on MacOS that wouldn’t work on iOS.

★ Wednesday, 28 May 2025