Fraudsters: This is how Apple secures the App Store

Scammers
This is how Apple secures the App Store

Apple uses several systems to protect consumers

© Apple

Time and again, criminals want to gain access to users’ money and data via apps on their smartphones. This is how Apple is doing it in the App Store.

For years, smartphones have been a popular contact point for criminals to steal comprehensive data from unsuspecting users or to pull money out of their pockets. Apple recently published figures that show how often such fraud attempts actually occur.

What is the App Review Team doing?

One of the central places in the fight against fraud is Apple’s App Review Team. This checks every single submitted app and all updates to ensure that the guidelines of the app store relating to security and data protection are being adhered to. In 2020, almost a million problematic apps and updates were rejected or removed. One reason could be that the application has simply not yet worked properly.

More than 48,000 applications that had integrated hidden features, over 150,000 apps that were marked as spam or as misleading for users, and more than 215,000 programs that would have violated the privacy of users were not allowed to be downloaded from the App Store. Overall, fraudulent transactions worth more than 1.5 billion US dollars were also prevented. In addition, it was prevented that more than three million stolen credit cards were purchased. Around one million accounts were also revoked to ever carry out a transaction again.

Even if developers change the way an app works afterwards, the application can be removed later if the whole thing is discovered. Users can report such incidents to the company using the “Report a problem” function in the App Store or via support.

When appraising apps – as in many other online offerings – there is also increased fraud. Apple therefore uses a system that consists of several components. Fake reviews are to be found using machine learning, artificial intelligence and human teams. Since 2020, more than 250 million reviews and ratings have been removed, and over 100 million have been processed.

Deceptive developers

If developers repeatedly get negative attention with fraudulent apps, their account will be terminated. In 2020, 470,000 of these accounts were removed and 205,000 applicants were rejected because of “fraud concerns”. Apple speaks of “aggressive monitoring”, which enables such accounts to be deleted on average less than four weeks after they have been created. You are also on the trail of fraudulent user accounts. Last year, 244 million customer accounts were deleted as a result, and 424 million suspicious accounts were rejected.

With Apple Pay and StoreKit, the group also wants to offer the most secure payment technologies possible, which are supported by 900,000 applications in the App Store alone. If, for example, a product is ordered from an online retailer using Apple Pay, the latter receives the payment, but the user’s credit card number is not transmitted.

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