Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “How I fell for Apple Scammers”.
Portion of this video is sponsored by scalar apple, hello, it’s john hello, john. This is apple. Did you just air quote apple? What no? How do you know that doesn’t matter? We see that you’ve got some suspicious activity on your account, like you sign up for our super duper mega ultra secret protection plan yeah. That sounds fake. No, it’s totally real. It’S got the name ultra in it, so you know yeah, okay! No thank you! Amateur that intro, i think, is how a lot of people view the idea of scams. They seem like a caricature.
They would know that the person on the other end had bad intentions. They could stop it before it happens, but the reality is they’re not like that and i’m somebody who should know better, but it almost happened to me, so it was about 7, 15 or so at night. Putting my kids in the shower. It’S a hectic time of night for me and i wasn’t really paying much attention like pretty much every account that i have. I have two-factor authentication on and i got an alert on my iphone that somebody was trying to change my password and the way apple does or two-factor you get a pop-up, you can authorize it it’ll, give you a code and then you can put that code and You can change uh, your password if you want, so i obviously hit decline on that things. Like that happen, all the time they pop up a bunch of accounts, i didn’t think much of it.
Then i got another one um about two minutes later. I was like that seems strange, so i decided to go and change my apple password anyway. You can do it all from the phone. It’S very easy.
My passwords are generally pretty long, usually hexadecimal. I went and changed it and then about three minutes later. My phone rang and my phone just said just apple uh on it and getting phone calls from apple was not uncommon. For me, i get a call from apple business all the time when new devices are coming out, they’ll, say: hey, we got these and you guys need them for for jfl and i can go in and buy them from their local apple store.
It’S a nice relationship. So apple calling me wasn’t out of the question at least didn’t raise any red flags, and i was with my kids paying attention. I just just answered it, so i picked the phone said hello. He said hello like to speak to mr rettinger.
This is apple, calling you’ve noticed several attempts from vancouver canada to change the password on your phone. At this point, i really i wasn’t thinking much of it. I should have realized first apple’s not going to call me for fraud protection much like most companies like from credit cards and banks are not going to call you for fraud protection but again benefit of hindsight. So no red flags raising me at this exact moment. Kids are running around the background. I said no, i don’t live in vancouver, canada.
That was definitely not me. They said, okay, we suspected it might be the case we’d like to enroll you in our advanced protection. Now, at this point, i’m somebody who generally knows most of what these big tech companies can offer and do and i’ve never heard of advanced protection. So i said what is advanced protection i said: well, we we lock your account um for a few days to make sure there are no unauthorized attempts. It just keeps things locked and more secure at this point like sirens are starting to go off, but the guy was very convincing, very nice on the phone, so i was like. Oh okay, you know uh tell me more about this he’s like well in order to authorize this, for you want to verify that. It’S really you we’re going to send you a one-time code. I need you to read that code back to me and those words should raise a red flag to anybody. Read a code back to me: unless you’ve called somebody or a company, nobody should ever call you asking for a code. So i very quickly said i’m uncomfortable doing that.
I’M not going to read your code and the guy hung up the phone and was at that moment where i realized her. The full scope of what was going on so apple’s, not unique in this a lot of companies and banks and all this stuff do the same thing. If you’ve got your password, you hit forget password, you put an email address or username associated with that account and they’ll send a code to your usually to your phone to verify that it’s you, then you can reset the password. Had i, given that code out, they would have been able to get access to my account and they timed it so perfectly they did these attempts, they knew, i would decline it, and then they called a few minutes later to make it seem proactive, like they were. Trying to help and that’s something called social engineering – you see at all times with cell phone companies, people trying to get access to get a new sim card, take over your phone um, you see it across cell phone carriers, obviously, and in the heat of the moment, I was so hectic i had so much going on. I almost read the code and again as somebody that should have known better. I figure if i came close to doing it and i’m i’m okay admitting this. If it helps somebody else not fall for the same thing. Hopefully it can help educate some other people and maybe raise some red flags for them. I’M gon na exhale from my scam story.
I’Ll tell you another story, you might not know about me. My only skill i’ve ever had in life has been my ability to talk and like anybody who could talk, i just kind of figured that my career was going to be a lawyer. It’S always what i thought i was going to be, so my parents convinced me to work at a law firm for a little while, and i very quickly learned that that was not for me and i didn’t know what i was going to do with my life. I had to find my place in the world and ultimately kind of stumbled, totally backwards into tech and youtube a place where not only if i felt like i belonged, be able to grow personally and professionally, but that’s not a benefit that a lot of people have Be able to find a place where you can grow so, for example like if you’re a software engineer, and you want to bypass the post, graduation, headaches and frustrations. You might want to pay attention to this video’s sponsor scaler with scalar’s advanced, expedited program. You can actually equip yourself with the tools that a lot of top employers like google and amazon are looking for and best of all you’ve got access to the industry professionals that will coach you on how to land the job of your dream.
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In fact, their system actually worked the way it’s supposed to, but i would have loved when i got that prompt either was to accept the change or decline it to have an option to lock a count for a period of time, maybe lock a count for 30 Minutes two days one week that at least could have ended everything right here, so they tried to submit the request for that code. It wouldn’t have come through. It was surprised that it said apple inc on the phone, i’m not somebody who’s delved too much into phone spoofing back this happened. I did some research and realized how very simple it is to see that i went back and looked in my call log and it does say apple link and i click it and it shows you know the apple phone number apple’s address the only thing that was A little bit strange was the logo looked off, but when they called the logo didn’t pop up, it just said apple link.
I only saw that when i went back and looked uh in the contact card, so you can’t trust what your phone is telling you. Now. You know t-mobile verizon att. They have some ways to try to block all this, but clearly a lot of scams and phone spoofing um is is going on.
So there are some things you can do to protect yourself and they might not work in every situation but broadly turn, two factor authentication on on absolutely everything is an incredible way to go on your phone set a sim, lock code. You can use apps like one password to remember passwords, but beyond that they can also generate temporary passwords that you can use to log in only good for 30 seconds, or so. Those are just some of the easiest quickest examples of things you could do to help protect yourself, but, most importantly, all of that are just barriers. People can jump over those barriers, but the biggest thing that you can do is just be vigilant and be very suspicious of anybody trying to get your information and again just because you know better doesn’t mean everybody knows better.
I shared the story with my parents to let them know: hey, never read a code out loud, they really didn’t know, and i think talking about the story in hindsight. It’S really easy to be like i would have known. I would have never done this, but here at the moment, if you’re distracted they might get through, the social engineering has been effective for reasons because it works on a lot of people. So i did want to share the story.
Let you know that this almost happened to me and very likely and very easily could happen to you as well share what not to do with friends and family and parents and grandparents, and let them know um if these scams become less effective. Presumably, this gamers will stop doing them. Um i’ll, probably move on to something more advanced, but at least if we can stop this right now, i think it’ll help a lot of people keep their identity, their accounts and their personal information as safe as possible. .