Apple is back in the crosshairs of European regulators, this time over online fraud. The European Commission has requested answers from Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Booking.com regarding their efforts to protect Europeans from financial scams.
On the surface, that sounds like a reasonable ask. Nobody likes fake bank apps or shady listings. But the timing here is telling, and for Apple, the whole thing borders on absurd.
Apple has spent years building its reputation around security and trust. Every keynote, every privacy ad, every App Store stat comes back to the same idea: your iPhone is supposed to be safer than anything else out there.
And Apple has the numbers to back it up. In 2024 alone, the company claims it blocked over $2 billion in fraudulent transactions and rejected nearly 2 million app submissions for violating rules related to security, privacy, or reliability.
That’s not a small operation. Teams inside Apple spend their days tracking and removing scams before they ever reach your screen.
Now contrast that with what the EU has been doing. Under the Digital Markets Act, Apple was forced to open the iPhone to third-party app stores and sideloading.
Those new rules are still being rolled out, but the shift undermines the very system Apple claims makes the App Store safe. Apple created a notarization process to scan apps for obvious fraud, but there are far fewer guardrails in place outside its own store.
The irony is hard to ignore: Brussels demanded weaker protections, and now Brussels is demanding answers about why fraud is a growing problem.
For Apple users, the frustration is obvious. The company is being asked to defend itself against threats it has spent years trying to prevent.
It’s easy to see why Apple feels like regulators are looking in the wrong direction. Instead of cracking down on fraudsters, the EU is making it harder for Apple to fight them.
Ultimately, users will decide who they trust more. On one side, you have Apple pointing to billions in blocked scams. On the other hand, you have a regulator that just made it easier for scammers to get in.
Who’s more to blame for scams slipping through: Apple for not catching them all, or regulators for enforcing weaker rules?
