I forget my account recovery key

It completely baffles me that there is NO way to retrieve the recovery key or be able to reset the password of the Apple ID.

In stolen phone & identity theft situations, when the Apple ID is hacked, password is changed and a recovery key is set by the thief, there SHOULD be an escalated verification / override process to retrieve it back. (Proof of purchase receipt with serial number, government id, proof of Apple ID purchases made to that email, police reports, etc etc)

Even if this security team is highly specialized and limited due to the sensitive nature of what is being asked by overriding a recovery key. They should be able to handle severe or emergency theft situations to get a Apple ID back to the proper person it was stolen from.

My husband was drugged and robbed, left on the side of the road, and then $70k was withdrawn from our bank accounts (they attempted to take $100k but thankfully $30k was blocked) before the theft ring “returned” him from the side of the road to his hotel. But because they locked him out of his Apple ID by changing the password, and then set a recovery key, we have lost EVERYTHING on iCloud and that device. Photos, contacts, not to mention apps etc.

Both the police and the hotel manager said this exact same incident happens all the time. (The officer actually took another case that same day of the same situation) With the level of sophistication that identity theft has gotten to these days, you would think Apple as the manufacturer would account for this in their account security protocols.

egm89 wrote:

It completely baffles me that there is NO way to retrieve the recovery key or be able to reset the password of the Apple ID.

…

The fundamental reason for using Recovery Key — the reason — is to block all password reset procedures, save for those that include the key.

If you want a fallback password reset mechanism, do not enable Recovery Key.

Or as happened here, to block the original account holder, preemptively enable it.

But unfortunately for information security, what can happen is what you have reported; what amounts to an “insider” threat.

Even with some form of hypothetical add-on multi-person or multi-party authentication scheme enabled, where no single individual has full account access, and where account access is also more involved for normal operations, the people involved in the access decision will undoubtedly still be hard-pressed to deny account access when what happens is closer to what you have reported. Or where somebody has preemptively enabled a Recovery Key (and presumably hardware security keys) to block a new key, there is still a path to seek to (coercively) reset the Recovery Key given the Apple Account password.

This somewhat morbid XKCD cartoon simplifies the options:

https://xkcd.com/538/

All of which means your request is a simple one: eliminate the recovery key, and do not provide any means to block Apple from resetting your account credentials.

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Securely “unwinding” and “reverting” or removing a Recovery Key at the immense scale of Apple (e.g. billions of devices and users worldwide) is a an immensely difficult and expensive problem, particularly against threats including what you have experienced, and where insider compromises involving staff at a cellular carrier or at Apple or related are also possible (and csn also seek to gain account access), and this “unwinding” process must also necessarily be resistant to people phishing and other sorts of social engineering.

What amounts to an insider threat is not easy to deal with.