Security News > 2022 > June > Apple blocked 1.6 millions apps from defrauding users in 2021
Apple said this week that it blocked more than 343,000 iOS apps were blocked by the App Store App Review team for privacy violations last year, while another 157,000 were rejected for attempting to mislead or spamming iOS users.
Throughout 2021, the App Review team stopped more than 1.6 million risky or vulnerable apps and updates from landing on the App Store and potentially defrauding users.
Last year, in the company's first fraud prevention analysis report, Apple said that almost 1 million problematic new apps and nearly 1 million app updates were rejected or removed by the App Review team.
Apple's efforts to protect users from fraud are welcome, seeing that scammy apps known as fleeceware are still a big problem on the iOS App Store, as discovered by researchers at Avast last year.
Sophos researchers also spotted dozens of fleeceware apps downloaded by iOS users approximately 3,680,000 times and listed among the top-grossing apps on the App Store.
"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."