VIRAL videos claiming thieves can steal iPhone owners’ card details through AirDrop are running rampant online – but none of them are telling the truth.
False claims of a new bank-raiding scam targeting iPhone owners have spread like wildfire on social media platform TikTok.
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The videos claim that “Apple Pay users with AirDrop toggled on are rendering themselves susceptible to financial identity theft,” Daily Dot first reported.
The theory is that if this setting is switched on, then a stranger in the street could initiate a walk-by tap-attack to transfer your card data to their phone.
But it’s not true, or even possible.
While the AirDrop feature can be toggled on for days at a time, it only really works with nearby devices for 10minutes at a time.
Any longer than that and it is limited to your contacts.
The cards inside your Apple Wallet or Apple Pay are also not shareable.
That data is locked down, and cannot be shared or transferred.
Apple Pay is more secure than your real wallet, according to Apple, because it doesn’t store or have access to the original card or card numbers.
Instead, when you add a card to your Apple Wallet, your bank sends Apple a unique device account number and encrypts it – meaning that code is scrambled for everyone, including Apple.
“The Device Account Number in the Secure Element is isolated from iOS, is never stored on Apple servers, and is never backed up to iCloud,” Apple says in a support page.
In terms of your Apple Wallet, then “iCloud secures your Wallet data — like passes and transaction information — by encrypting it when it’s sent over the Internet and storing it in an encrypted format when it’s kept on Apple’s servers,” according to Apple.
While there have been other scams and crimes associated with AirDrop, such as phishing attempts and cyberflashing, your financial details cannot be transferred directly.
The false story is thought to date back to the release of the NameDrop feature in 2023, Daily Dot reported.
This is a proximity data transfer feature for contact cards only.
Yet, TikTok users have created their own narrative on what AirDrop is capable of, which has snowballed across the platform.
It comes as the US seeks to ban TikTok over the security of data and its links to China’s government.
US lawmakers from both political parties have supported a law that would ban the platform for all 170million US users unless TikTok is sold by its Chinese parent company, ByteDance.
While TikTok has tried to appeal the law, calling it “unconstitutional”, a US court rejected the attempt earlier this month.
On Monday, the app, and ByteDance, asked the US Supreme Court to intervene and stop the nationwide ban.
“The Act will shutter one of America’s most popular speech platforms the day before a presidential inauguration,” TikTok wrote in its filing.
“This, in turn, will silence the speech of Applicants and the many Americans who use the platform to communicate about politics, commerce, arts, and other matters of public concern,”
The ban could come into effect on 19 January, 2025, unless ByteDance sells TikTok by that date.
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