The different methods that can be used to extract information from users can be fascinating. The most typical without a doubt are the pishing messages that can be received, but now they have reached another level. In Pennsylvania a user has reported a scam that has been done through the impersonation of Apple‘s customer service. This has cost him more than a thousand dollars, and we tell you exactly what has happened and how you can try to prevent it.
Impersonating Apple itself cost him $ 1,500
The protagonist of this story is Donna Francis from Pennsylvania. This Apple user contacted the company’s support number that he found on the website, as he had previously received a call from an official Apple distribution store. After seeing that they did not have a technical support division, they recommended contacting Apple itself. After giving the different personal data to a girl, she referred him to another person who, according to the user, told him the following:
Don’t want to waste time, people from Russia and China are hacking your account. They just charged $ 5,000 to your account.
At the moment, in fear that this was totally real, Francis began to trust this person and the solution he offered to tackle the problem of theft. Specifically, it granted him permission to install software on the iPhone that would act as a remote control. The moment he took office, he went directly to the banking application and when asked by Francis why he was accessing that information, he told him that that was where the problem was.
Before you knew it, the hacker was sending all the money in the user’s account to a different one. And when asked why he was transferring money, the call ended losing all this money.
The first reports suggest that the call was intercepted by a hacker when he was contacting Apple. This is the most logical situation that can occur, since if the user was calling the official customer service by picking up the phone from the website itself, it could only be intercepted by an expert. Although, it is suspecting that the user will make a callback to the number that had previously called him and which he had not answered. Here we would talk about another type of scam and not about interception of customer service.
At first, the investigations believe that this interception cannot be given and less so to steal so little money. Right now it is being investigated to be able to give clear conclusions, although a priori this system has not been registered again.
So you can protect yourself against these ‘attacks’
You always have to be very attentive to everything that may happen when we use technology. In this case an important cunning on the part of the hacker who finally achieved his goal. You must always bear in mind that you must be suspicious of almost everything that sounds suspicious to you. At first you must always bear in mind that customer service will never ask you to install remote control software asking you to go to an Apple Store in case of problem. And also, the company itself has no information on whether they are taking money from your bank account as it is not owned by them.
In short, you always have to avoid calling unknown numbers and not installing strange programs that you cannot control yourself since something similar to this that we are seeing right now may end up happening to you.
