Apple App Store fraud: $US2.2bn blocked in 2025

Apple said it blocked more than $US2.2 billion (about $3.4 billion) in potentially fraudulent App Store transactions in 2025, offering a fresh measure of fake accounts, scam payments and review manipulation inside one of the world’s biggest mobile software marketplaces. In Apple’s 2025 App Store fraud report, the iPhone maker said that total sat within $US11.2 billion (about $17.3 billion) in suspicious transactions stopped over the past six years.

For Australian iPhone users and local developers, the figures show how much policing is now required to keep app rankings, subscriptions and in-app payments credible. App stores sit underneath banking, transport, education and retail apps in Australia, so abuse around account creation, billing and reputation systems can quickly spill into trust in the marketplace itself.

Apple said it rejected 1.1 billion attempts to create fraudulent customer accounts in 2025. It also said App Review rejected about 2 million problematic app submissions and filtered 195 million fraudulent ratings and reviews, two controls that influence which apps users trust and which developers get discovered. For smaller studios that depend on search placement and subscriptions, that kind of manipulation can affect revenue as well as visibility.

In its report, Apple said its defences combine manual review with automated detection. The company said it uses “expert human review and advanced machine learning technologies” to detect and stop malicious activity.

Scam payments, fake reviews and mass account creation sit in the same trust chain. If a store fills with bogus ratings or deceptive subscriptions, it becomes harder for users to navigate and harder for legitimate developers to compete on ordinary terms.

Pressure on platform policing

Apple said its Trust and Safety teams also stopped multiple large-scale attempts to create fraudulent accounts in 2025, suggesting the contest now runs across identity, payments, submissions and discovery signals at the same time. That is a broader enforcement problem than removing a rogue listing after it appears, because the pressure reaches into the systems that decide who gets paid and who gets seen.

SecurityBrief’s Australian coverage of the disclosure framed the figures as a platform-safety story rather than a product update. For Australian readers, the practical question is whether a major mobile marketplace can stop fake identities, manipulated reviews and payment abuse from eroding confidence in the software people use for banking, transport, work and media each day.

Review fraud remains a sensitive pressure point because ratings and comments still work as a shortcut for trust inside app stores. When Apple says it blocked 195 million fraudulent reviews in one year, it is also saying reputation systems need constant policing if users are to treat rankings and star scores as credible. Developers that depend on those signals have little room for organised spam.

The disclosure does not settle wider disputes over App Store fees or gatekeeping, and Apple did not provide independent verification for every figure in the statement. It does give a clearer sense of the operating burden attached to running a tightly controlled app marketplace at global scale. Screening billions of dollars in suspicious transactions and more than a billion fake account attempts is part of the infrastructure required to keep a closed mobile store credible.