ATTENTION iPhone and Mac Users! Don’t Fall Prey to the Safari-Alert Scam

My friend fell victim to an online scam yesterday. While using Safari on his iPhone, a pop-up telling him his phone was infected would not go away. The pop up offered a phone number to call to fix the "security issue." Dialing the number was his first mistake.

Long story short, the "Support tech" on the other end of the line eventually got my friend to surrender his card info and $199.99 for [1 year of tech support] and to have "technicians" scan and fix his phone. It's a Scam.And it's been around a while.

They are very clever and manipulative. They preyed on my friends fear of his personal information like banking apps being compromised, my friend gave the scammers access to his desktop computer (which runs Windows 8 by the way) as he plugged his iPhone into it via USB so their "Apple techs" Could "fix" it. They presented him with a barrage of graphs and "Data" showing "infections". They even took his screen to Wikipedia to show him the definition of a particular virus, koobface.

I found a number and called these guys back and went berserk on some dude in India. They promised a "refund" in 24 to 48 hours. We'll see.

Apparently there are several versions of this all with different numbers to call. Beware!!!

Here are a few links to discussions on Apple's Support page:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7073600

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6518076

This site seems resourceful too.

https://sites.google.com/site/appleclubfhs/support/advice-and-articles/browser-popup-hijack-safari#ios