Apple blocked 1.1 billion fraudulent account creations on the App Store

Apple announced data related to blocking violating applications and accounts on its platform in 2025. This is part of the transparency report that the company has periodically published in recent years.

Accordingly, the company said the App Store application store has 850 million weekly visits in 175 countries and regions, an increase from 813 million the previous year. Parallel to the development are the risks from “problematic” content. The company said it blocked more than $2.2 billion in potentially fraudulent transactions last year, bringing the total value of blocked transactions to more than $11.2 billion over the past six years.

While most metrics have not changed much compared to before, two factors that changed strongly were fraudulent accounts and applications submitted for review. Apple said it rejected 1.1 billion fraudulent account creations in 2025, up from 711 million the year before. 40.4 million accounts linked to fraud and abuse were disabled, down from 129 million previously. According to Apple, this is the result of “blocking bad guys in the first place”. These accounts may be part of a bot network that spreads spam, manipulates rankings, or creates fake reviews to scam users.

Last year, more than 1.3 billion ratings and reviews were determined to be fake and removed. Using proactive detection, Apple blocked nearly 195 million fraudulent ratings and reviews before they appeared.

In addition, the company also implemented measures to prevent malicious developers from participating in the ecosystem. In 2025, it terminated 193,000 developer accounts due to fraud concerns and rejected more than 138,000 registrations. This, according to the company, is to ensure that genuine developers do not have to compete with fraudulent groups. Another indicator that also increased sharply was the number of application review requests reaching more than 9.1 million, up from 7.7 million the previous year.

According to Apple, the application of AI in software development has driven this sudden increase. Last year, it rejected more than 2 million app review requests, including more than 1.2 million new apps and nearly 800,000 app updates, for not following its guidelines. Conversely, more than 306,000 new developers were also recorded on the platform.

As a place with a large volume of transactions, Apple said it uses both human and technological review methods to determine the use of stolen financial information. Last year, they prevented more than $2.2 billion in fraudulent transactions and blocked more than 5.4 million stolen credit cards used to make fraudulent transactions. Nearly 2 million user accounts were banned from trading related to this issue.