Apple blocks many Applications from defrauding Users
It has been stated by Apple Inc that over the course of last week that more than 343,000 iOS apps were blocked by the App Store App Review team for privacy concerns and violations last year, while another 157,000 were rejected for attempting to be legit apps to mislead or spam iOS users. The corporation also said that they blocked over 34,500 applications from getting indexed on the App Store because they were using undocumented or hidden features. 155,000 more apps were also removed for bait-and-switch tactics, such as adding new features or capabilities after approval.
All around 2021, the App Review team has been quite occupied stopping more than 1.6 million risky, dangerous or vulnerable apps and updates from landing on the App Store and potentially defrauding and violating users. In the company’s first fraud prevention analysis report, they stated that almost 1 million problematic sneaky new apps and nearly a million app updates were rejected or removed by the team. Additionally the company’s efforts to protect their users from fraud attempts require much time and monitoring and vigilance of multiple teams focused on several areas from App Review to Discovery Fraud.
“Apple is dedicated to keeping the App Store a safe and trusted place for people to discover and download apps,” the company said in this year’s report. “A key pillar in that effort is Apple’s ongoing work detecting and taking action against bad actors who seek to defraud developers and users.” Furthermore, dodgy apps known as fleeceware are still a big problem on the iOS App Store as discovered by researchers at Avast in 2021. Such applications lure users with promises of free trial when in fact they require excessive subscription costs of thousands of dollars per year.
Apple Inc was also able to protect their users from $1.5 billion in potentially fraudulent transactions throughout last year, Blocking the use of more than 3.3 million stolen cards on Apple’s online store platforms and banned nearly 600,000 accounts from ever making transactions again across their platforms. “For many people, no data is more sensitive than their financial information. That’s why Apple has invested enormously in creating more secure payment technologies like Apple Pay and StoreKit,” Apple added. “These technologies are used by more than 905,000 apps to sell goods and services on the App Store. For example, with Apple Pay, credit card numbers are never shared with merchants — eliminating a risk factor in the payment transaction process.”
