Angelo921 wrote:
I keep getting text messages from various numbers telling me that my old iPhone 14 Pro still has me logged in and they have access to all my data and telling me to go to the Find My app and remove it. I wiped the phone and also removed it from my devices (confined it’s not showing up) so is this a scam?
What is their gain from this since phone is not still under my devices? So far I have mot replied back to the messages.
Do you possibly have something scammers want such as money, or a vote, or money, or causing and reaping annoyance or anger, or, well, money, or a working and unlocked iPhone and working and unlocked iPhone parts, or do scammers just want to harass you or gaslight you?
If so, you will get scams.
Apparently screaming and desperate callers claiming to be injured or arrested relatives or friends, callers claiming to be police or government officials, fake debt collectors, offers of romance to the lonely, political or propaganda campaigns, or whatever the hook. If it possibly involves a path to any sum of money, there’ll be a scam.
Here, the scammers want a working and unlocked iPhone with working and unlocked parts.
I use the Bouncer app to filter the text scams and political ads as that works entirely on-device, as well as muting messages from unknown callers and unknown senders.
The US phone network and the carrier text network are headed toward noisy irrelevance, if the carriers don’t get this sorted. In the US, the following two tags (“spam risk”, and the checkmark ✅ — not the “main” text) shown in the Phone app list of callers are part of the carriers trying to avoid irrelevance:
TL;DR: ignore them. It’s basically free for the scammers to call or send or email spam, so they do. Any return they get is profit. Or in this case, any unlock they get. Given you’ve left the iPhone locked (Activation Lock), and that makes the iPhone and its major parts worth rather less to the scammers and thieves.
