Apple introduced its new iPhone 13 lineup yesterday, together with the newest Apple Watch and AirPods versions.
But, as year-to-year shows, not only Apple fans are interested in such events – for several years now, Kaspersky experts have detected intensified scamming activities amid the long-awaited Apple presentations.
To learn more about how fraudsters monetise users’ interest in new Apple devices, Kaspersky researchers analysed numerous phishing pages offering to buy the new version of iPhone as well as previous lines of bestselling AirPods and Apple Watch.
Most of these sites are fake pages offering to buy devices at a special price. Happy to find a good deal, a user sends money to fraudsters and, unsurprisingly, never receives the new pair of purchased headphones.
There are also phishing pages providing users an exclusive opportunity to buy the new iPhone before the official release.
To place an order, users send their identifying information into untrustworthy hands. After that, scammers may start using such data for bad purposes or sell it in the Dark Web. This fraud scheme is quite popular and, in some cases, scammers ask to pay for delivery fee – so users end up with not only sharing their personal data but also losing money.
No need to say, the gadget never gets to the deceived user.
“Apple presentations have always been a popular lure for scammers to roll out malicious activity,” comments Tatyana Shcherbakova, security expert at Kaspersky. “For several years now, we see how fraudsters use the buzz around new iPhone release and start spreading malicious features. This only shows that scammers would happily benefit from anything that attracts users’ attention.”