Recently the Wall Street Journal had an article and a YouTube video about a woman who was looking at her iPhone in a bar and she had just input her 6 digit passcode and the phone was taken out of her hand by a thief. The thief immediately changed her 6 digit code (he knew what it was as an accomplice had filmed it) and also changed her Apple ID password which he could do easily because he had her 6 digit code and the phone was open. He also changed her trusted alternate phone number to his number. Within hours he took $10,000 out of her bank accounts (all the passwords etc were in the apps on her phone). He also made some kind of Apple credit card and did a bunch of shopping with it. She was locked out of her iCloud account on all of her other devices. AND she has never been able to get any of that data back, 15 years of photos are gone.
This kind of theft has been happening in bars in New York City and Seattle as well as other places. I know the best thing to do is to NOT use your phone in a bar or other public place or to cover you phone when inputting the 6 digit passcode or make an alphanumeric passcode. But is there anything else we can do in SETTINGS, for example, that would stop these thieves from stealing all you data and money??
I didn’t realize that if someone knows your phone’s 6 digit passcode, they can easily change your Apple ID password with no effort.
