An iPhone burglar who has stolen hundreds of smartphones has shared his methods, revealing some software flaws that Apple Inc. may want to investigate.
The Wall Street Journal columnist Joanna Stern revealed to Aaron Johnson, who is presently serving a sentence in a Minnesota correctional facility, that he and his group had stolen hundreds of iPhones.
He said that they would operate out of bars in Minneapolis, making friends with patrons, learning their passcodes, and then robbing them of their phones. Johnson could steal thousands from victims’ banking apps, lock them out of their Apple accounts, and then sell the phones once they had the passcodes.
The 26-year-old declared, “You got the key to everything when you got your face on there.”
His scheme targeted gullible iPhone owners by taking advantage of the Apple ecosystem.
According to the report, thieves may be able to use Apple Pay to make purchases if they manage to crack your iPhone’s passcode. Additionally, any app—like Venmo or email—that doesn’t have additional security could be weak.
Johnson’s operation emphasizes how important it is to secure devices because they hold sensitive financial and personal information. His method was as easy as watching owners of iPhones enter their passcodes and then taking the phones.
Johnson and his group allegedly made close to $300,000 from the operation, but he believes the real amount was much higher.
Johnson, who had previously been convicted of theft and robbery, entered a guilty plea to racketeering and was given a 94-month sentence.
Apple did not answer Benzinga’s request for comments right away.
To counteract these passcode-assisted thefts, Apple unveiled a new feature earlier this month called Stolen Device Protection. Nevertheless, possible holes still exist despite the impending software update.
The importance of Apple’s Stolen Device Protection, a security feature intended to discourage iPhone theft, is highlighted in the report. This feature tries to prevent criminals from gaining access to the user’s private passcode even if they manage to obtain it by requiring the use of Apple’s FaceID in conjunction with the passcode for sensitive actions in unknown places.
But as Johnson’s case shows, criminals are always coming up with new ways to get around these security precautions.
In an attempt to profit from stolen devices, iPhone thieves attempted to trick a user into disabling these security features last November, underscoring the continuous cyber threat that iPhone users must deal with.
Johnson also disclosed how he started stealing. “I’m already serving time. I just feel like I should try to be on the other end of things and try to help people,” he said. “I was homeless. I started having kids and needed money.”
“I really couldn’t find a job,” he said. He then moved on to stealing iPhones, usually higher-value iPhones but occasionally Android phones as well, after realizing how far a passcode could get him into the phone. “So that’s just what I did.”
Epic Games’ CEO Tim Sweeney: Showdown with Google Like ‘Ice and Fire’—A Unique Perspective on the Tech Clash
The makers of “Fortnite,” Epic Games, may be rejoicing right now that they have won a historic antitrust case against Alphabet Inc.’s Google, but in a case that was similar to this one, a U.S. judge found in favor of Apple Inc. in 2021. This begs the question: What changed between these two cases?
After the ruling against Google, Tim Sweeny, the CEO of Epic Games, said in an interview with The Verge on Monday, “I would say Apple was ice and Google was fire.”
According to him, Apple’s “antitrust trickery” was kept within the organization. “They use their store and their payments; they force developers to all have the same terms; they force OEMs and carriers to all have the same terms.”
However, in order “to achieve things with Android,” Google paid carriers, OEMs, and game developers to stay out of the competition. “When all of these different companies do deals together, lots of people put things in writing, and it’s right there for everybody to read and to see plainly.”
Regarding the distinction between the two cases, he said, “I think the Apple case would be no less interesting if we could see all of their internal thoughts and deliberations, but Apple was not putting it in writing, whereas Google was.”
In a different interview with CNBC, Sweeney emphasized yet another distinction between the two businesses, stating that while Apple forbids sideloading software from the internet, Google’s Android platform does.
“The big difference between Apple and Google is that Apple didn’t write anything down, and because they’re a big vertically integrated monopoly, they don’t do deals with developers and carriers to shut down competition; they just simply block at the technical level,” he stated.
In 2020, Epic Games filed a lawsuit against Google, claiming that the tech giant takes advantage of its market dominance to negotiate with phone manufacturers and extort additional fees from customers.
Google takes a 15% to 30% cut of every digital item that customers purchase via its store. By allowing users to purchase Fortnite directly from Sweeney’s company, the company attempted to evade paying those fees. This resulted in Google removing the game from its store, which sparked the lawsuit.
