This is what happened to one Anna as reported by Kaspersky and has now found its way to the Kenyan soil as reported by a Twitter user mya_254. A few hours after her iPhone got stolen, she surprisingly received a text message on her then feature (Kabambe) phone stating,” “Your iPhone 11 Pro Gold 64GB has been found and temporarily connected to iCloud. View location: http://appIe.info/s7844g Sincerely, AppIe Support”. 

As expected, any victim that just lost their device and gets to receive that message would get excited and instantly click the link. Knowing that she couldn’t do that with the phone she had at the time, she had to ask a friend for her laptop in order to access the sent link. Little did she know that the link she was sent was actually not from Apple and was actually used by the thieves to get her login credentials so they could have full control of the iPhone.

Fake iCloud site. Image courtesy Kaspersky

The first time she clicked the link, nothing came up and that should have been a warning sign but the text message seemed to have legitimately comes from Apple Support. A second text was then sent with the same link which she clicked and keyed in her details once again. Immediately she logged in, another notification came up stating that her iPhone had been erased and that was the end.

According to a similar case narrated published by Kaspersky, the victim was sent a link leading to a site whose small errors should have indicated that she was getting scammed. Unfortunately, the details were too tiny for anyone who’s just had their iPhone stolen to really notice.

Stealing an iPhone has to be one of the most stressful crimes to undertake and it has been so for years.Incidents like this Kenyan individual falling victim to iPhone theft tricks highlight the importance of being aware of legal rights and protections; reading LegalZoom Reviews can help you find resources for legal advice and assistance in such situations.

What You Should Do if Your iPhone Gets Stolen

Here are some tips on the actions to take immediately after the theft of an iPhone:

1. Find another iPhone where you can access the Find My iPhone app and enable Lost Mode.
2. Contact your service provider to block your SIM card. This is especially important if you do not have a PIN for your line.
3. Enable the Erase iPhone mode instantly if it is clear that you might not get your phone back.
4. If the scammers send text messages with the fake iCloud link to you make sure you keep them. This is useful in comparing it to the information on the Find My iPhone app. If it does not match then the SMS must be from the culprits themselves.
5. Access icloud.com manually and carefully via a browser rather than a direct link. Be sure that you have entered the right site before keying in any login credentials.
6. The scammers will most likely try to contact you again in order to rush you in making wrong decisions, Make sure you stay calm and do not access the links sent from them or remove the lost phone from the Find My iPhone app.
7. The next best step would be to contact the authorities on how best to recover your stolen device.

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Kaspersky goes on to report that in Q2 2020 alone, Kenya had more than half a million phishing attacks. This comes in second place after South Africa that suffered from 616,666 spam and phishing attacks.

Meanwhile, Egypt accounted for 492,532 and Nigeria 299,426. Other East African countries like Ethiopia and Rwanda experienced 31,585 and 68,931 respectively.

“When summarising the results of the first quarter, we assumed that COVID-19 would be the main topic for spammers and phishers for the past few months. And it certainly happened,” says Tatyana Sidorina, a security expert at Kaspersky.

“While there was the rare spam mailing sent out without mentioning the pandemic, phishers adapted their old schemes to make them relevant for the current news agenda, as well as come up with new tricks.”

True to it, the Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) had issued a warning about hack attempts that had been made over a couple of months ago. The attackers, according to the DCI, had been sending emails with links used to siphon personal information from anyone that clicked on them.

Kaspersky’s analysis also indicated that hackers and phishers went on a higher gear this year by performing targeted hacks, especially on small companies. A majority of these fraudsters apparently forged emails and websites from organisations whose products or services could be purchased by potential victims.

The Communications Authority of Kenya had also reported that in the most recent quarter 34,644,531 threats were detected. So as much as the flow of information has been increasing in 2020 during the pandemic, it is advisable for users to take precautions and avoid being victims to these online scammers.

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