Recently a Scamicide reader reported receiving a text message that read “Your Apple#ID has been locked, tap here to_unlOcked”  By the way, the last two words are not typographical errors by me in writing today’s Scam of the day although they certainly are a good indication that the scammer sending the text message doesn’t do a very good job of proof reading.

Your Apple ID is the account you use to access a wide variety of Apple services such as the App Store, Apple Music, iCloud, iMessage, Facetime, Apple Pay, Apple TV+ and many more.  Anyone who clicked on the link would be sent to a fake, but legitimate appearing Apple website where, if you provided your Apple ID you would be turning it over to a scammer who could take control of your account as well as lock you out of it.

TIPS

A good place to start to avoid this scam is to remember that Apple doesn’t send text messages to people informing them that their account has been locked.  Another easy way to determine if your account has been locked is to simply login to your Apple account.  If you are able to do so, your account has obviously not been locked.

Trust me, you can’t trust anyone.  A good way to protect your account even if someone steals your account number is to use dual factor authentication.  Here is a link that shows you exactly what you need to do to set up dual factor authentication for your Apple account https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/use-two-factor-authentication-iphd709a3c46/ios#:~:text=On%20your%20iPhone%20go%20to,to%20your%20trusted%20phone%20number.

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#appletextmessagescam #textmessagescam #dual factorauthentication