Things the guys who stole my phone have texted me to try to get me to unlock it

These days, it's not worth it to steal an iPhone. It's a useless brick.

That Apple knows where it's at.

No, they sell the parts if they can't get the phone unlocked. Even if the phone would be a worthless brick, a stolen phone is a phone that the owner will never get back. Fresh e-waste, straight into the landfill I guess. Is this sarcasm?

Apple puts effort into making you go to them for repair parts. Any deterrence against thieves is simply a fringe benefit. Don't credit them for something that isn't actually their goal.

It’s interesting though… it’s still worth something to thieves, they still can recycle the screen, buttons, case etc. I’ve had my iPhone stolen in recent years too, people can’t resist. Don’t get me wrong, it does feel good to stick it to the perp but doesn’t apple itself have the most to gain from locking most of the value away? The second hand market is completely gated by them. Broken FaceID? You need a new phone…

This is a win win for Apple

Not so much if it allows the thief to cet contact info of the original owner.

Not enough, apparently. She still got robbed of her iPhone and had to buy another one.

The police state is interested in maintaining the power structure in the police state. As long as petty or even organized crime does not upset the balance of power, the authorities couldn’t care less - crime against Americans is no danger to them. Just as the Russian government has no interest in cracking down on its blackhat population, as long as they target non-Russian orgs.

1. Chinese government is not as competent as it tries to appear.

2. They do not care about foreigners or crimes unless they involve Chinese citizens.

Misconception: police solve crimes.

Truth: police protect their employers.

Well this isn’t against a citizen. Also look at the murders going on in China now.

The police does in fact care about phones belonging to Chinese owners stolen in China. They couldn't care less about phones belonging to Americans stolen in America.

Often stances of the governments across the world are: we’ll ignore it unless it becomes a problem for us. Often, in organized crime, money flows back to the government and creates job opportunities for people that keeps them happy. There is a reason. Why there’s so many scam call centers in India. The government will turn a blind eye until someone comes in with proof that raises a stink or if other international government agencies get involved.

China is not a police state, they are a military state. The US is a police state. In China the local cops are generally far more hands off than an in the US. China is more top-down from the national level. In the US, local police are the typical mechanism for control.

If we angled more towards detente with China, they probably would - but why do they have any reason to crack down on crime targeting an 'adversary' state?

The US hosts many Chinese criminal financiers and embezzlers that we have no intention of extraditing to China.

Much like the US or Europe? Yeah... money comes first.

China simply isn't a police state.

More to the point, it is authoritarian, but you also have things like prostitution going on in broad day light. The central and local governments have a very focused attention span, and if what bad thing you are doing is outside of that, they probably won't notice.

Just don't sell/buy drugs, or get into fights when drunk.

That “police” in “police state” is a different concept than the police you know of.

If the police in New York clearly didn't care about a crime that was committed here, why would the Chinese care about it 8,000 miles away from where it happened?

> cracking down on obvious crime

As inconvenient as it is for the author and those in their similar situation this sort of petty crime is about on the same level as bustinng a massage parlor.

And honestly it woul hold the same low priority everywhere not just in China

The law in China is: if it affects social order, then feel the state's wrath. Anything else is a free for all.

Well this also applies if someone friendly finds your phone and wishes to return it. It's a catch 22 there.

That's not my understanding of the situation at all.

The journalist:

- Marked the phone as lost;

- Wiped all data;

FTA: As quickly as possible, I did all the things you’re supposed to do when your phone is lost or stolen —- mark it as lost, cut off service, and remotely erase it

She did not, however, remove (delete) that iPhone from her iCloud account, which means that the iPhone can't be factory reset by the thieves because "FindMy" is still activated.

FTA: As long as I didn’t remove the phone from my Apple account or the Find My app, the phone was essentially bricked to anyone without the passcode and my iCloud password

The iPhone did not, at any time, leak any personal information. What probably happened is that she had a SIM card on it, and from ejecting the tray and putting the SIM into another phone they managed to get her phone number, from which they started contacting her with the threats/scams.

I think this wouldn't even be possible with a e-SIM in the newer iPhone models.

How exactly can they get the phone number though? The only thing I can think of is if there was an unlocked (no PIN) physical SIM-card, and they could just insert it into another phone.

And yes, e-SIM solves this problem.

From the article comments:

“when trying to reset my phone they are prompted to enter my iCloud password. My iCloud email is also one of the ways to reach me via iMessage. So they used that to contact me”

In the case that I lost my phone, though, instead of it being stolen, I really might want my contact info displayed on the lock screen so someone who finds it can get it back to me.

Yes, I know, in many anti-social places in the world (like most US cities), it's much more likely that the phone was stolen, or that even in the lost-phone case, the person who finds it will be shitty and not try to return it. But in many (most?) other places people are generally honest and will try to return something that's lost.

Then again, if you know that it was stolen, you should be able to keep the thief from getting your contact info.

The Lock Screen displays what you ask it to. When you mark a phone as Lost or perform a Remote Erase, you can push down your contact data if you'd like (ie - if you think a "friendly" found the phone and you want it back), or you can elect to type nothing, an offensive message, etc. Likewise for the "Medical ID" feature (which is also available with the phone locked) - you can elect to display lots of details, some details, or no details at all.

It's probably best not to declare war upon China in writing. Instead, ask how many students died in the 1989 Tiananmen massacre. That specific phrase should specifically auto-alert the censors to a known forbidden topic, without resorting to threats against China.

How long of a lost phone message can one set, anyways?

Serious question: have you tried this or are you theorizing?

In my (limited) experience private one on one messages are not censored. Or at least this was the case several years back... It's possible things are more strict now.

At least in my tests on Wechat you could discuss tiannanmen square or whatever you want with individuals. Some stickers were censored on Wechat and wouldn't show up. I think images as well may be don't get delivered.

Virtually all censorship and cases of people being arrested are when people talk about these things in large group chats (if a group chat has more than X amount of people it needs to be "registered"). My impression was it's a government fear of things going viral and controlling the public sphere and not about creating a panopticon/state-terrorism

Again.. This might be out of date, but this was at least the case for a long long time.

They don’t. I have tried this and other similar things such as sending images banned in China (but otherwise totally fine). Perhaps they weren’t in China I suppose.

If it's wiped then there's no data for them to get?

Is there not a 3rd option for iphones to remotely wipe and brick further use?

There are, but they aren't cheap. For a recent iPhone, expect to pay a seven digits price.

The article says the author already performed a remote erase. There's no data recoverable.

Send them Tiananmen Square photos or messages about the CCP, anything that can trigger the great firewall. Thats what my friend did. They stopped messaging immediately.

I don't think b) is realistic at all. They're just using scare tactics.

https://help.apple.com/pdf/security/en_US/apple-platform-sec...

So as I understand it, all of the "parts" are mostly worthless because they wont just work in another iPhone.

How do you maintain this functionality and give the "right to repair"? I would assume that it's possible but would add a fair bit of cost to devices (not that someone like apple cant bear said costs)... But IM just guessing on that front as I have zero experience with hardware locking.

It's roughly a subway stop east of it - the hotel I stay at when I visit is almost at the exact point on that map - but remember that Chinese maps and GPS do not line up (check that spot on google maps and then turn on the photo layer you'll see that the streets don't line up) - the actual spot looks like the mall even further east.

Huaqiangbei is legit (and a wonder!) - the spot that would be a real smoking gun is the Huaken Building (aka the "Dodgy Cellphone Market") which is south of Shennan Middle Rd and between the spot on the map and Huaqiangbei. That place is pretty amazing in its own right, at the east end people sell bits of phones, dead phones, 'recycled' phones - they are torn down into parts which are reassembled onto new PCBs and resold at the west end of the building - it's full of lots of little cubes, people each doing a part of the process and onselling their work product to the next person - if you ever thought your phone can't be worked on by hand, can't be fixed, you are so wrong, these are real professionals - they take junk and make it real again.

If the phones were simply being recycled it would be wonderfully OK, even if Apple hates the idea of this sort of grey market, they'd rather we threw them away so they can sell new ones. As I understand it many of the Apple chips these days are 'paired' at the factory, you can't just replace one (and they have to pass through the above process together as a unit) this may mean (I'm completely guessing here) that they're still screwed if the user wont erase their phone, even if they completely remake it

Those e-markets are filled with adjacent buildings where the market spills over, so it very well could be near but in a building that has an Adidas store.

The glory days of the e-markets are almost over though, the one in Zhongguancun is much smaller than it used to be, but you still need to know the right building to go into to get your old X-box or Wii unlocked.

Agreed. Anti-theft is a higher priority for me than repairability.

The part pairing isn't the problem, it's that you can't unpair parts. Creating a secure unpair process would not be beyond Apple's capabilities.

The world you describe is much worse for the environment.

You understand the impulse to steal because a job doesn't pay well? I don't. I would understand the impulse to go back to school to develop a marketable skill, but not to use the force of the state to steal from people.

Edit: Would you still find this behavior understandable if the TSA agent directly stole from passengers as their bags were scanned? What if the passenger in question ignored the collaborating-TSA-agent and moved to confront the thief; would you understand their behavior if they arrested the iPhone owner, you know, since they're underpaid. Would you accept the same behavior from a local NYPD beat cop? They aren't paid well when they first join the force, can they steal from random people too?

It happens often. Here's a new one with a video https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/miami/news/tsa-agents-accused-of...

This is 11 years old but relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLxsLbl16IM

She has tracked the iPhone via find my through a few us cities and finally it’s in China.

I wonder… if people whose phones get stolen start tracking the locations they see it travel to using Find My, and a site were available to report these to, could enough evidence be collected to motivate a police/FBI visit to the location of fences in the US who are shipping these to China?

(Could one prevent such a tool from being used maliciously to swat someone?—I suppose in the end a specific victim would have to go to the police in person, limiting that risk? I’m imagining the address-collecting site might respond “yes I’ve seen more than (say) 20 phones reported at that location, you may want to work with local police if you can”.)

If they are still harassing her, can you try one of the tricks above? Start talking about banned topics.

It's why I have the "general rule" of: Don't reply to any text from anyone that I don't know. And if what I'm receiving "seems off" reply with a subtle "challenge" (mention a fictional pet that passed away ... the scammer will play along, your friend will probably send you a "?" to which you can ... carefully ... explain "I wanted to make sure you weren't a Nigerian Prince posing as Alice").

I know my personality would make it very tempting to reply to a message coming from the person who stole my phone, maybe taunt them a bit, but you're kind of giving into their game when you do. I mean, best you can do is burn a little of their time, which is probably much less valuable to them than yours is to you and put up with increasingly hostile threats[0]. Contrasted with completely ignoring any text that arrives regarding the phone (immediately blocking any arriving from accounts from social media) they're left assuming -- for whatever reason -- you're not even getting the threatening texts.

And, of course, if the scammer were planning on following through with the threats it'd be a very labor intensive, high-risk, low-reward operation -- not the "make a quick buck" that stealing and reselling a high value piece of electronics is supposed to be. There are too many legitimate ways to make more money that involve less work and less risk to pick "crime" as the choice. And while that means it's unlikely the scammer will follow through with the threat, that assumes the scammer is intelligent enough to understand how stupid it would be to expose himself to make a few hundred dollars and tends to vary depending on the amount of illicit substances the scammer is trying to manage the withdrawal symptoms of at that moment. It also assumes that the scammer isn't the actual thief, and the thief isn't some gang thug who'd be more than happy to follow through with the threat simply because "your mean words hurt their feelings"[1].

I figure, ignoring them is the quickest/easiest path to applying at least a tiny bit of pain.

They're gambling; you and every other one of their victims is "the iPhone game". It starts with a box of bricked iPhones. Find the owner, send them a combination of words gleaned from a forum that other scammers have had success with and text your target. You win when you crack the right combination of words that causes a bricked iPhone to become almost instantly convertible into anywhere from a few to several hundred dollars. I'd imagine most slot machines would hit less frequently and pay out less when they do. Enough bricked phones have to become "a few hundred dollars" to feed the player's gambling addiction[2] so you're providing the lever "pull" of the slot machine -- free entertainment for them. By ignoring them, you're taking away that tiny high that comes when they experience "Hope" -- the "hope" that your "pull" will pay out.

Take that away ... block 'em ... but maybe peek into "Spam" every once in a while if you want a little ego satisfaction.

Maybe they sent you a few hundred messages of the "Apple Pay" variety. Now close your eyes and imagine your lone scammer with a box of locked iPhones (it's your fantasy, make him a lonely middle-aged white guy living in Mom's basement who hasn't showered in 2024), checking each bricked phone "to see if you've won", then the messaging app to see if anyone is going to give you a chance to play further ... only to find your fourteenth "Apple Pay" message disappear into the dead Ether ("And they sent the last one from RUSSIA, how could they ignore RUSSIA!?"). If they are the kind with a glass ego, nothing will make you feel less adequate than copying/pasting fourteen unanswered messages as imagine the answer you're not going to get to number fifteen.

Short of maybe social engineering them to click a link to malware[3] and maybe turning the tables a little, I can't think of anything more effective.

[0] And the stones on the thief -- or did your sister leave it unattended? I have spent no time in Austin, specifically, but a lot of time in Texas. Some places it seems everyone is carrying, right out in the open, carefully concealed (if you know where to look) ... whatever. At least a few of my buddies carry hoping for a reason to use it. I suspect in the parts of Texas I'm familiar with, if this happens at all, Find My yields it quickly recovered without police involvement, and maybe the thief's trailer/truck got a little fscked up during "pick-up".

[1] They'll talk about being disrespected but at the end of the day, the problem comes down to an adult who would still fail the most basic parts of Kindergarten (don't misread that statement as implying anything about my feelings regarding the cause/reason/fault of such things; let's just walk away from that one for this footnote).

[2] I couldn't find the study but over a decade ago I recall reading a that people with "clinically diagnosed kleptomania" (naively: "stealing for fun, regardless of need") had extremely strong tendencies to be gambling addicts, but that gambling addiction couldn't be correlated with a higher frequency of kleptomania (gambling addicts do skew higher for theft, but are often thieves out of perceived necessity, limiting to kleptomaniacs was intended to identify the similarities between the underlying psychological disorders).

[3] This is a little tricky and comes with the "you're probably breaking the law, now, too" problem ... tricky because the scammer is probably using a texting app/web service. As a result, there's a larger number of OSes involved -- it would be less unusual for your sender to be texting you via a browser in Windows than you'd probably experience, otherwise, so if you, say, somehow convince them they need to "click that link" in order for your phone to complete unlocking, you're going to also have to work out a way to get them to reveal what OS they're sending from.

I think most of the cases people give up and unlock it

Is there a good reason why you might want to remove an iPhone marked as lost from your iCloud account? It seems like something that should just not be possible.

Doesn't seem like a lot of work to me. Sending out that message takes a few minutes, and I would assume that most people would simply cave in and delete it. It's gone anyways, so they don't really lose much, and being threatened does things to people.

Doesn't seem too much, some people write hundreds of comments/tweets per day with no expectation of pay.

I assume they just eject the SIM card tray and get your phone number from the SIM by simply putting it into another phone.

“Mark As Lost locks your screen with a passcode and lets you display a custom message with your phone number to help you get it back. You can also remotely erase your device if needed. Your custom message continues to display even after the device is erased.”

https://support.apple.com/en-us/108794

By default you can set the "lost mode" message. many people put their contact info into it, in case someone wants to be helpful. This is how these scammers get this info. There is no other way to get the icloud contact info from a phone with a PIN/password.

Easy now Rorschach, would you really want to live in a society like this? I could imagine finding out my cousin got murdered because he didn’t realize he was selling old iPhones that were stolen with a plan like this. This is comic book levels of absurdity and extremism.

Just because cruel and unusual punishment would be an efficient-in-some-regards way to approach punishment doesn’t mean it’s a humane approach.

Humane is top priority. Punishments should be commensurate to the crime committed - with under-punishment always preferable to over-punishment.

The fact that people like you exist is far more damaging for the world than phone thieves.

This.

Have an updoot my good sir

Nice try, FBI.

Bold of you to assume I have friends.

¯ \ _ ( ツ ) _ / ¯

EDIT: Thanks for the award, kind stranger!

I don't know, millions of phones are stolen every year. Seems likely that some reporter's would be stolen once in a while. It's a little too mundane to be made up.

I do not get the link between the quote and the accusation

You're just used to Android. It's hard to put buttons on a phone that's nearly all screen.

If I am understanding you correctly, you are having trouble with the "double tap" of the Touch ID models right? This operation was much easier on the smaller iphone SE. They probably designed it for that design(iphone 4-5S) due to its smaller size that allowed one handed operation and then carrying it over to the current SE design(iphone 6-11) is probably not ideal for that form factor(thinner and rounder).

I believe the FaceID models solve this by having you slide the app up slightly to then select between it and any other open apps or go back to the home screen. Maybe that would work better for you?

Also, this is just my opinion but like I mentioned, the iPhone SE Gen 2+ uses the last gen design language which started back in 2014(iphone 6) and has been gone from the main line for years now. It always felt super slippery and prone to dropping(too thin and those rounded edges are difficult to grip) which is why I held onto my iPhone SE Gen 1 until the new iPhone 12 came out.

This is just my opinion but maybe you should go to a store and check out their other models.

They don’t. They’re using another phone and texting the original owner, threatening them, in order to scare them into unlocking the device.

When you boot the “Lost” phone, it asks for the password of the owner’s iCloud account. There is probably an information leak where the original email or phone is presented and the thief can track the original owner through that.

Yeah, when I sold my old iPhone I wiped it and removed it from my account so that the new owner could use it. The site I was selling on warned me multiple times that it would be unusable without that step.

Is it true that if you remove it from Find My iPhone then they are able to unlock it?

Yes, as long as it is in your account, nobody can activate it. When you remove it, it can be activated by someone.

The Activation Lock remains if you use Remote Erase - all documented on Apple's site: https://support.apple.com/en-us/108794

Only Remove Device specifically deactivates Activation Lock.

Yes, but that would also be awful for all the people around your phone when it may not have been stolen and could have just been actually lost.

I was wondering the same thing. Maybe it was on the lock screen? Seems unlikely that they managed to remember its association with the phone throughout, though.

edit: we have the answer https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40579230

As you can see, most of the phones she tried didn’t have passcodes but were still linked to iCloud accounts

I guess she didn't have passcode on.

If you set your phone to lost mode it'll offer to let whoever has the phone contact the owner. This is done without unlocking the phone and AFAIK is done without revealing your contact info.

But… it's easy (and reasonable) to think that whoever has your phone also has your contact info which makes these sorts of scams that much scarier.

> The author didn't explain "how the scammer was texting her".

In a comment on the article replying to someone pointing this out the author explained that she was receiving iMessages and not simple texts. The scammers identified an email address linked to her icloud account when trying to reset the phone and set her iMessages to that email address.

Agree - what the author claims doesn’t seem likely. I would be worried about my email address leaking. My email address has my full name. So they can easily find out where I live and work if they spend a bunch of time googling my name. Exposing my Phone number would almost be preferable over exposing my email address in this scenario.

For real, without a strong sense of resentment, you would probably give up just to stop the texts. It's not like you lose anything further (apart from increased chances of theft in the future for everyone I guess).

Most criminals are unbelievably stupid, particularly when it comes to risk assessment.

It's a good idea. And if you already buying a new one, so you can definitely go to the "brick" mode

Physical SIM card?