Organization enrollment declined with no reason provided — 2 open support cases, no response

I had almost the exact same experience with a Wyoming single-member LLC (foreign/non-resident owner) — valid D-U-N-S number, EIN, passport, and an active company website. Went through a document verification round (passport, employment/role verification letter, formation documents), resubmitted everything requested, and still got declined with no specific reason — just a generic note about enrolling as an individual instead.

Called Developer Support by phone afterward to ask for clarification, and was told the decision was final and not subject to appeal, no reason given.

Did you ever find a path forward on this, or any more specific reason from support? Starting to think this may be a structural issue with how Apple's verification handles newly formed, solo-founder, foreign-owned LLCs rather than anything specific to the documents submitted.

Starting to think this may be a structural issue with how Apple's verification handles newly formed, solo-founder, foreign-owned LLCs rather than anything specific to the documents submitted.

Why would you do that? Setting up a company in your own country is difficult enough. Why would you want to do it in a foreign country? I'm a US citizen. I could setup a US-owned company in Delaware, Wyoming, or anywhere else - but I would never do that because the complications, costs, and especially taxes would be mind-bogglingly insane. I really can't imagine anyone wanting to do that.

More importantly, it's well-known that scammers like to setup fake front companies in these easy-to-register locations. Originally it was always Delaware, but Wyoming has decided it wants some of that scam business too. Apple knows this. I've been to Wyoming. I wouldn't want to run a business there.

For anyone thinking of doing this - don't. It's bad enough we have to e-mail the NSA. Don't involve yourself in US law and taxes if you don't need to. I can't begin to explain how insane that is.

Thanks for the reply — at least it points to a possible reason behind the rejection.

For context: I'm a developer based in China. I did compare costs, and forming a company in China is noticeably more expensive than a US LLC. I haven't done a detailed comparison on the tax side — I'd guess every country has its own complications there.

The more concrete driver is payments: I have another SaaS product that needs a platform like Stripe, and Stripe doesn't support companies registered in mainland China. A US entity was really the practical path to get access to that kind of payment infrastructure, not an attempt to cut corners.

One more thing worth pushing back on: using a registered agent to set up a bare-bones LLC doesn't automatically make someone a scammer. Not every founder has the capital to set up something more elaborate or hire a lawyer for every step. Facing a final, non-appealable rejection with zero explanation is genuinely disheartening when you're just trying to build something on a limited budget.

And every piece of personal information I submitted was genuine — real passport, real address, real signature. If someone actually intended to scam people, they'd do it regardless of which country or state their company happens to be registered in. Jurisdiction isn't really what determines whether someone's a scammer.

I'd guess every country has its own complications there.

But no country is on the same scale as the US. IRS regulations are unimaginably complicated. Any kind of "foreign" involvement will easily run into thousands of dollars just for accountants and lawyers, assuming you can find any that will even talk to you for such trivially small fees. And then there's the regular threats of imprisonment if you fill out the forms incorrectly.

A US entity was really the practical path to get access to that kind of payment infrastructure.

That's the right way to look at it. It's an "entity", not a real company.

using a registered agent to set up a bare-bones LLC doesn't automatically make someone a scammer. Not every founder has the capital to set up something more elaborate or hire a lawyer for every step.

That's all true. But that's what I'm talking about with regard to an "entity" vs. a "company". Both are legal, fictional persons. But they're also not the same. Other companies have the right to choose who they do business with. Some companies are wholesale only and will not sell to individuals. Other companies go the other way and refuse to provide tax receipts, invoices, or other artifacts that businesses typically demand.

While you may not be a scammer, you are benefiting from the scammers. So many of them setup these fake companies for tax evasion, money laundering, and so many other reasons. Because there's so much money there, these companies typically can enjoy easy access to financial services.

But Apple is different. Someone who doesn't have the capital to setup a business can simply enrol as an individual. Most companies in most other industries don't allow that at all. And on the other side, just because you have a legal entity doesn't mean Apple is willing to do business with you.

In truth, all companies, Stripe included, work this way. They have their own criteria for deciding who they do business with. It's just that Apple is the biggest so it gets the most complaints and the most press. I've had multiple other companies refuse my business or drop me, not because I did anything wrong, just because of who I was or what I was doing, which was never illegal, immoral, or unethical in any way. But not Apple.

So if you're trying to setup an organization account with Apple, it probably not a good idea to use those well-known LLC entity sites. Apple knows what they are. Apple has over 60 million developers. It can afford to pick and choose.

Thanks for laying that out — it genuinely helps me understand why the enrollment was likely declined.

The "benefiting from scammers" framing is honestly a bit jarring to sit with. I'm just a developer who followed a fairly common YouTube-tutorial playbook for setting up a US LLC to sell software globally — it never occurred to me that going through a well-known registered agent would put me in the same bucket as fraud or money-laundering operations in Apple's eyes. But I take the point that the perception exists regardless of intent.

Not knowing any of this going in made the rejection pretty rough to deal with. Email support never responded, and the phone call just ended with a cold "this is a final decision, not subject to appeal." That's really why I ended up here — I just wanted to understand why.

I'm just a developer who followed a fairly common YouTube-tutorial playbook for setting up a US LLC to sell software globally

Yeah. The internet's not true.

It was much easier 30 years ago. But today, it's a real minefield.

Selling from the US offers no benefits to an individual developer. Technically, you are correct about the ease of access to financial services from the US as compared to China. But that easy access was designed for people moving millions or billions. It's not meant for you.

The biggest issue these days is tax and consumer law compliance. The EU started that. The US is slowly getting into the game. Sellers are now expected to comply with the laws at the consumer's point of purchase. So that means all laws in the world now apply to individual software developers sitting at home at their computers.

There are a handful of companies that provide global pricing and tax compliance for developers. By "handful" I mean about 5. Apple is one of them, but operates much differently.

Most of the hassles that Apple imposes on developers are part of an effort to prevent fraud. But aside from Apple, fraud is simply another internet business, and an extremely profitable one. Government regulators generally look the other way as long as taxes are paid. So Apple has to do most of the work on its own, with a lot of secrecy.

Had a discussion with AI about this afterward, and it helped connect a few dots.

On the scale of it: FBI IC3 reported $20.9B in online fraud losses in the US alone in 2025, up from just $1B in 2015 — a 20x increase in a decade. Combined with FTC data, the reported total hits $36.8B. That's before counting unreported cases or anything outside the US. At that scale, "fraud as a business" isn't really a metaphor — it's organized, well-funded, and iterates on its tactics the same way any other industry does.

On why fraudulent operations look like normal companies: it's not that they're especially good at faking it — it's that the bar to legally form an entity (LLC, EIN, D-U-N-S, business bank account, website) is so low that it filters out essentially nothing. States profit from registration volume, not from vetting legitimacy, so the paperwork trail looks identical whether you're a legitimate solo developer or a shell company.

On why Apple doesn't just clean up after the fact: banning an account post-hoc means the damage (chargebacks, scammed users, reputational cost) already happened, and re-entry is cheap — a new LLC is a few hundred dollars and a few days. So front-door verification, as blunt and painful as it is, reduces total fraud volume in a way that after-the-fact bans alone can't.

On why they don't just permanently ban the person instead of playing whack-a-mole with entities: it turns out Apple's identity verification does try to do this to some extent. Per Apple's own documentation, their ID verification vendor extracts and retains the document ID number (passport number, etc.) during the photo ID check — not just a one-time face match. In theory that ties a fraud flag to the person, not just the account or entity, so switching Apple IDs or forming new LLCs doesn't necessarily reset anything if the underlying ID is already flagged.

The catch is this cuts both ways. It can't distinguish between an actual repeat offender and someone who tripped a cluster of unrelated risk signals for the first time — which might explain why my phone call ended in a flat "final decision, no appeal" rather than a specific reason. If the block is sitting at the identity/document level rather than the document-quality level, no amount of resubmitting cleaner paperwork under the same passport would move the needle.

And it turns out this isn't just theoretical for me. Support had suggested enrolling as an Individual instead, so I tried creating a new Apple ID to do exactly that — and got hit with "ID verification rejected" on the very first identity check, before any company or D-U-N-S info was even involved. I reported it back to support, who said they'd look into it. So at this point it genuinely looks like my personal identity information itself may already be flagged, independent of the LLC. Which is a pretty stark example of a legitimate user getting caught in the same net as actual fraud.

This reminds me of an important plot point that's easy to forget.

Fraud on the internet is more than fraudulent developers trying to scam Apple or Apple's users. In many cases, it's small developers who are the victims of fraud.

When confronted, actual fraudsters are more likely to laugh it off, because they know they're frauds, but it pays big money. Victims are more like to be offended when told that they've been defrauded. They'll often double-down in support of the people that scammed them and attack the people who told them about it - people like me or Apple.

That's a fair point, and it actually clicks something into place. I'd guess the registered agent likely pays referral/affiliate commissions to YouTube creators who recommend their service — that would explain who actually profits from steering people toward this path. I can't think of anyone else in the chain who'd benefit from it. The tutorial gets ad revenue and an affiliate cut either way, regardless of whether the viewer's enrollment ever actually succeeds.