Greg's Corner

Don’t hand your phone to strangers

By Greg Collier

Before the advent of the smartphone, your wallet used to be the one thing you couldn’t leave the house without. Now, except for drivers’ licenses, just about anything your wallet used to hold can be done though your smartphone. Many smartphone superusers don’t even carry wallets anymore and just use their phone. Thanks to tap to pay platforms like Apple Pay, many don’t need to even carry their debit or credit cards anymore. However, too many smartphone users don’t treat their phone like they would their wallets.

In a suburb of Memphis, Tennessee, some teenage scammers set up shop outside a supermarket. They claimed to be selling candy to help their football team. Like many of us today, their victims were not carrying cash. When the scammers were told by the victim they didn’t have any cash, the scammers would ask if the victim could support their YouTube channel. The scammers then offer to pull up their YouTube channel on the victim’s phone. What the scammers were really doing was going into the victim’s Cash App and sending the victim’s money to themselves. Some victims were taken for $300 while at least one other lost $1800 to the scam.

This is a variation of a scam we’ve seen before. Previously, scammers would act as if they needed to call someone as if they were in an emergency situation. The scammers would then use the victim’s unlocked phone to access any number of financial accounts.

The scam described above is essentially the same as handing someone your wallet so they can put their business card inside it. You wouldn’t just hand your wallet to a complete stranger so you shouldn’t do so with your phone.

However, if you still want to help people out who may be needing your phone’s assistance, there are ways to protect yourself. Many apps like Cash App and Venmo have security precautions you can enable, so these apps can only be accessed by the phone’s owners. These can be done either by using a PIN or fingerprint scan, depending on the type of phone being used. This way you can still help those in need to make phone calls without risking your finances.