A year ago, I brought to your attention a scam related to stolen iPhones and Apple’s very effective Activation Lock feature. The scam went something like this:
- Your iPhone gets stolen
- Days or weeks later you get contacted by the thief with a phishing email or text that encourages you to enter your Apple ID and password to locate your phone.
The reason why you get contacted by the thief is that iPhones have a feature called Activation Lock. That effectively makes the phone useless to sell for anything other than parts because there is no way for a thief to erase it and sell it as new. And if the iPhone is new enough, a lot of those parts are tied to the specific iPhone, which makes it even less valuable to a theif. Thus the thief needs to get you to turn of Activation Lock if they want to make any money off of it. To top it all off, the thief in question is likely using what I call a “scam as a service” to facilitate contacting you to get you to turn off Activation Lock. I’ve covered how these services work here.
But the reason why I am posting this today is that this scam as of late has taken a really bad turn recently. Threads have popped up on Reddit like this one that say that death threats are now being used to get people to remove Activation Lock from their iPhones. Here’s an example of a text that one Reddit user received after their iPhone was stolen:
Clearly this would scare anybody. But let me be clear. There’s no way for the threat actor to find you and to harm you. And also for the record, there is no way that the threat actor to get access to the data on your iPhone. They are simply trying to scare you into removing the phone from your iCloud account which would remove Activation Lock and allow them to sell it for a lot of money. Under no circumstances should you do what the threat actor is asking you to do.
Apple has some tips on that you should follow if your iPhone gets stolen. And this advice is also largely true for iPads and Apple Watches as well as newer MacBooks as they have the Activation Lock feature as well. If you follow this advice, there’s no way that these losers can get a good payday at your expense. Or put another way, you get to ruin a scumbag’s day so that they don’t make anywhere near the amount of money that they want to.
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This entry was posted on June 9, 2023 at 9:13 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Apple. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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The Stolen iPhone Activation Lock #Scam Has Taken A Very Disturbing Turn
A year ago, I brought to your attention a scam related to stolen iPhones and Apple’s very effective Activation Lock feature. The scam went something like this:
The reason why you get contacted by the thief is that iPhones have a feature called Activation Lock. That effectively makes the phone useless to sell for anything other than parts because there is no way for a thief to erase it and sell it as new. And if the iPhone is new enough, a lot of those parts are tied to the specific iPhone, which makes it even less valuable to a theif. Thus the thief needs to get you to turn of Activation Lock if they want to make any money off of it. To top it all off, the thief in question is likely using what I call a “scam as a service” to facilitate contacting you to get you to turn off Activation Lock. I’ve covered how these services work here.
But the reason why I am posting this today is that this scam as of late has taken a really bad turn recently. Threads have popped up on Reddit like this one that say that death threats are now being used to get people to remove Activation Lock from their iPhones. Here’s an example of a text that one Reddit user received after their iPhone was stolen:
Clearly this would scare anybody. But let me be clear. There’s no way for the threat actor to find you and to harm you. And also for the record, there is no way that the threat actor to get access to the data on your iPhone. They are simply trying to scare you into removing the phone from your iCloud account which would remove Activation Lock and allow them to sell it for a lot of money. Under no circumstances should you do what the threat actor is asking you to do.
Apple has some tips on that you should follow if your iPhone gets stolen. And this advice is also largely true for iPads and Apple Watches as well as newer MacBooks as they have the Activation Lock feature as well. If you follow this advice, there’s no way that these losers can get a good payday at your expense. Or put another way, you get to ruin a scumbag’s day so that they don’t make anywhere near the amount of money that they want to.
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This entry was posted on June 9, 2023 at 9:13 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Apple. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.