Apple blocked $2.2 billion in potentially fraudulent App Store transactions in 2025, up from $2 billion the prior year, pushing its six-year total to $11.2 billion.
Apple’s systems rejected more than 1.1 billion fraudulent account creations, deactivated 40.4 million existing accounts for fraud or abuse, terminated 193,000 developer accounts, and turned away 138,000 new enrollment applications. Apple also detected 28,000 illegitimate apps on pirate storefronts and blocked 2.9 million illicit installation attempts in a single month. It stopped 5.4 million stolen credit cards and barred nearly 2 million accounts from future transactions.
That $200 million year-over-year increase from last year’s $9 billion cumulative report signals something specific: fraud volume doesn’t plateau. Apple’s multilayered defense, combining human review with machine learning, is holding for now, but the attackers are scaling at the same rate.
The structural pressure isn’t speed, it’s identity. Verification systems built before AI could generate photorealistic faces or clone voices now face adversaries who can clear those checks at machine scale. Apple scrubbed 195 million fraudulent ratings and reviews from the storefront in 2025 alone, a category that barely registered as a threat vector a decade ago. Every additional friction point Apple adds to catch AI-generated fake accounts risks snagging legitimate users too, and those false-positive costs don’t disappear.
Apple evaluated 9.1 million app submissions in 2025 to reach these numbers.
Marcus Webb