Jeff Johnson, developer of the StopTheMadness Safari extension, is calling out what he describes as “pervasive and obvious” App Store ratings fraud that Apple’s review process is failing to catch. TabControl Extension was sitting at #12 among top paid Safari extensions in the US Mac App Store while displaying a fake, apparently AI-generated screenshot showing “4.9 out of 5” stars, falsely implying that was the app’s actual App Store rating.
When developers submit an app to the App Store, Apple reviews the listing metadata alongside the app itself, which explicitly includes screenshots. The claim baked into TabControl’s screenshot, a fabricated 4.9-star rating, should have been straightforward to flag. As Johnson points out, Apple holds the ratings data for every app across every country, so verifying whether a displayed rating is accurate is not a complex technical problem. The screenshot was simply false advertising, and it made it through anyway.
Johnson’s proposed fix is that at a minimum, any app hitting a top chart position should automatically trigger a new, more rigorous review of the app and the claims in its listing. A #12 ranking in a paid category is a meaningful commercial position, and the stakes of missing fraud there are higher than in obscurity. Apple has documented scam apps on the App Store before, including fake VPN and casino apps, but those were caught after external exposure rather than during review.
According to the company’s annual App Store safety report, Apple prevented over $2.2 billion in potentially fraudulent transactions last year, adding to more than $11.2 billion across the past six years. The company also:
- Rejected over 2 million problematic app submissions in 2025
- Blocked more than 1.1 billion fraudulent account creations
- Identified and blocked close to 195 million fraudulent ratings and reviews before they appeared
- Removed nearly 59,000 apps that used bait-and-switch tactics, initially approved as games or utilities before being modified for financial fraud
Those numbers represent real enforcement, but they say nothing about what gets through. Johnson acknowledges that catching every instance of App Store fraud is not a realistic standard. His point is that an obviously fake star rating in a screenshot, on an app that has climbed to a visible chart position, should not require a developer outside Apple to notice it first.
Apple describes its approach as combining “expert human review and advanced machine learning,” a system built for scale. Johnson’s example suggests scale is not the issue here. A fake bitcoin wallet that stole $1.8 million from users is one data point; a fake star rating visible in the listing screenshot of a top-charting app is another. Both cases involve false metadata passing review. Apple reported blocking fraudulent transactions in 2022 as well, yet the pattern of obvious metadata fraud reaching chart positions persists.
via 9to5Mac
