Apple reports its efforts for fraud prevention

SAN FRANCISCO, May 11 (Xinhua) -- Apple on Tuesday reported its efforts for fraud prevention, saying that the company has protected users from more than 1.5 billion U.S. dollars in potentially fraudulent transactions in 2020.

Last year, Apple prevented more than 3 million stolen cards from being used to purchase stolen goods and services, and banned nearly 1 million accounts from transacting again by the fusion of technology and human review, the company said.

In 2020, the App Review team assisted more than 180,000 new developers in launching apps, while nearly 1 million problematic new apps, and an additional nearly 1 million app updates, were rejected or removed for a range of reasons, according to Apple.

A smaller but significant set of these rejections was for egregious violations that could harm users or deeply diminish their experience.

In 2020, the App Review team rejected more than 48,000 apps for containing hidden or undocumented features, and more than 150,000 apps were rejected because they were found to be spam, copycats, or misleading to users in ways such as manipulating them into making a purchase, Apple said.

According to the company, another common reason apps are rejected is they simply ask for more user data than they need, or mishandle the data they do collect. In 2020, the App Review team rejected over 215,000 apps for those sorts of privacy violations.

Apple said that it terminated 470,000 developer accounts in 2020 and rejected an additional 205,000 developer enrollments over fraud concerns, preventing these bad actors from ever submitting an app to the store.

In 2020 alone, Apple deactivated 244 million customer accounts due to fraudulent and abusive activity. In addition, 424 million attempted account creations were rejected because they displayed patterns consistent with fraudulent and abusive activity, the company said.

Since 2020, Apple has also processed over 1 billion ratings and over 100 million reviews, and over 250 million ratings and reviews were removed for not meeting moderation standards, according to its report.