Apple does things a bit differently for its Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales, giving customers gift cards instead of slashing prices on its products. While this makes sense for the company — these gift cards will be used in its stores or online — it’s an approach that inadvertently opens its customers up to gift card scams. And those scams are starting to appear.
According to a new blog post (opens in new tab) from the email security company Armorblox, many Apple users recently saw their inboxes flooded with emails that claimed to come from the iPhone maker. While these emails appeared to be legitimate at first glance, they were actually phishing emails used to steal the Apple passwords of unsuspecting users.
Instead of offering new gift cards or Apple products, the cybercriminals behind this scam use Apple’s decision to give out gift cards to holiday shoppers as the lure. These emails have the subject line “We’ve suspended your access to apple [sic] services” and explain that a user’s Apple account has been suspended after the company “recently failed to validate your card information.”
This is quite clever as many Apple users likely bought new products on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and some of them may have even used their new gift cards to purchase additional products or even gifts for others. Spending a lot of money on Apple’s website or in one of its stores and then finding out you may lose access to Facetime and iCloud is more than enough…
