iPhone thieves use Spear-Phishing to pick up unlocked pin

Professional-acting international thief gangs have developed a new stitch to be able to resell stolen iPhones as expensive as possible: They try to persuade their victims with professionally upset phishing sites to betray their device pin. As Mac & I reader Michael Kania reports, who runs an IT service, he recently found such a case in Barcelona. His iPhone was stolen on the market in La Rambla. The device was blocked and the police were informed. As you usually do, contact information was read on the lock screen – in this case that of his wife.

Thieves become phishern

After the police were informed, the iPhone could be followed into a certain quarter in Barcelona. “Shortly afterwards, my customer’s wife allegedly received an SMS from Apple as the sender,” said Kania. This contained a link including the correct device designation iPhone 15 per max. Under the link, the localization is possible. “The whole thing was quite fake and not immediately recognizable for the layperson that it was not an Apple domain.” After opening the left, a perfectly fake lock screen of the iPhone in the browser appeared except for spelling errors. Here the thieves hoped that the user enters the real locking code.

Of course, the victim did not do that, but gave a wrong code to keep the thieves busy – in the hope that they would go online. Over the following days, more SMS came with alleged location reports and the same link – again and again in an attempt to elicit the PIN to the victim. The police couldn’t do anything anymore. After all, the stolen iPhone found itself “where is?” In Shenzhen in Chinese, where it was probably broken down into individual parts. Fortunately, at least it was possible to remove the data on the device.

iPhone pin of central importance

It is known that thieves will try to get to the device PIN. So there should be iPhone recyclers in Shenzhen that “blackmail” users: They send the message to “hacker” via the contact address on the blocked iPhone, if you cannot extinguish it thanks to PIN. In the metropolis near Hong Kong, there is said to be an entire house full of companies that specialize in the unlocking and decomposition of stained Apple smartphones. For theft sacrifices, this means that after the claw you have to be very careful: messages of the thieves should not be trusted, strange links must not be clicked.

The iPhone PIN has even more meaning than just for unlocking the device: it was also an important access medium for the Apple account for a long time, on which practically everything depends. Apple has implemented a new anti-theft mode here since iOS 17.3.