It’s a scam like there often is, but it risks costing Apple dearly. In the United States, the firm found itself in court due to its involvement in a gift card scam.
Apple will put its hand in its pocket to settle a class action lawsuit filed in its native state of California. As Reuters explains, the firm is accused of profiting from a gift card scam that claimed thousands of victims and generated millions of dollars in revenue for the scammers behind the embezzlement scheme. organized.
Hundreds of millions of dollars at stake
The idea behind the scam is simple: a victim is contacted by someone they know (via email or phone number hacking methods) who asks them to purchase Apple gift cards for an urgent need. Once the card is purchased, the scammer asks the victim to read the numbers on the back of the card which allow the amount of the gift card to be transferred to an Apple account.
By multiplying these scam attempts since 2015, criminals of all kinds have a priori amassed “hundreds of millions of dollars» thanks to the system put in place by Apple. Worse still, according to the complaint filed before the Californian court, Apple would have pocketed 30% of the sums embezzled in each transaction as a “commission” charged to convert the sums of the gift cards into hard currency.
A gift card to pay your taxes
Despite the safeguards implemented by Apple, in particular the inscription of a text reading “do not share your code with anyone you do not know», the Californian justice considered that the company had its share of responsibility in the affair, having taken advantage of the system without putting in place sufficient consumer protection measures.
The amount awarded by Apple to the plaintiffs has not yet been revealed and negotiations are currently underway. Regardless, these kinds of scams have been going on long enough that Apple has dedicated an entire page on its site to it. It states that a series of scams have taken place in recent years with fraudsters requesting gift card payments for reasons as fanciful as “taxes, health bills, debt collections or bonds to get out of prison“.
Source : Reuters
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