“Mobile devices, being valuable, expensive, and both thin and light enough for sticky fingers, are a constant target for thieves worldwide,” Charlie Osborne reports for ZDNet.
“What happens when your iPhone is stolen?” Osborne reports. “Where does it end up — and how is it cleared for resale?”
“These are the questions that on Tuesday, researchers from Trend Micro have attempted to answe,” Osborne reports. “In May 2016, the team stumbled upon an operation in which threat actors were offering tools and services to break open iCloud accounts and unlock stolen iPhones. Investigating further, Trend Micro found that at the core, the attack chain harnesses a victim’s panic to take over these devices.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: As Osbourne notes: If you buy a secondhand device, you should check it has not been blacklisted or stolen so you are not inadvertently funding these kinds of operation. In the US, you can use the CTIA website to check a device’s IMEI to make sure it has not been reported lost or stolen.
Always buy a new phone from Apple, so that is not a problem.
If you paid $1,000 for an iPhone X, it might not be stolen, but some of us might say you have been robbed.
Whiner.
You have the option to buy or not buy whatever you choose. Should you choose to purchase an item which is not within budget for many others, that does not mean that you’ve been robbed. It simply means that you enjoy a luxury that they do not.
Get over your whining about the cost of the iPhone X. Quality costs money. Miniaturization costs money. And the iPhone fulfills so many functions that it is actually a bargain compared with the old, standalone device approach – camera, GPS device, phone, portable video player, portable music player, calculator, clock, PDA, etc. – not to mention the convenience of having all of these functions readily available in a small form factory that can run for many hours on internal battery power.
Furthermore, you do not have to purchase an iPhone X (or any iPhone, for that matter).
Finally, if you choose to buy something knowing the cost, then the only reason for claiming to be robbed is that the device was defective in some way. But Apple has a fairly generous return policy – so you have no excuse at all if you do not figure out whether the iPhone offers adequate value in four weeks.
There are too many people like you in this world – a bad attitude that only changes for the worse.
Apple store i worked at laundered phones they knew were questionable because they do not want even a theif to have a bad experience at an apple store, they looked the other way.
Bullshit