Android owners have a number of security issues on their own phones, but here’s one just for the iPhone owners.
The iPhone-to-iPhone text messaging, called iMessage, helped Apple advance their market by allowing people to text when only on Wi-Fi or from email message directly to iPhone user text message.
That’s great and innovative, but there is an iPhone security feature allowing scammers to take advantage of iPhone users. It’s called end-to-end encryption and this means that only the sender’s software can encrypt (scramble) the message and only the receiver’s software can decrypt (unscramble) the message. (It’s more complicated than that, but I promised I wouldn’t get technical in my articles.)
Guess who can hide behind the encryption? Scammers, of course.
iMessage and the mobile carriers don’t know if it’s your friend texting you, or a scammer out to steal all your money.
And because iMessage doesn’t require cell service, there are entire rooms of iPhones that spend all day sending scam texts to your iPhone.
The mobile carriers can’t help you. All you can do is help yourself. I wrote about scam texts in this previous article. Please defend yourself with knowledge. Trust no one that texts you except for those in your phone’s address book.