Text message scam alert: “Your Apple-ID has been disabled for security reasons”

Several of my clients in the past few days have gotten a similar message to this:

Your Apple-ID will be disabled for security reason. to avoid it,You should see more details and follow the next steps at: [LINK]

This is nothing more than what is known as a phishing scam. If you tap the link it will take you to a website that asks for your iCloud username and password. Once you type it in the hackers have it and they will be able to get at least partially into your iCloud account and they now know that it’s a password you might use on other websites.

If Apple does lock your account you will find out when you try to log in again. They don’t go out of their way to alert you about that. But apart from that there are a few other things that tip me off about this. Apple ID is two words, not hyphenated. And Apple would never send something out with obvious mistakes like forgetting to capitalize the first word of a sentence (“to”), missing spaces between words (“it,You”), and random words capitalized in the middle of a sentence (“You”). They would also never use a bit.ly link.

If you fell for this scam I recommend you immediately change your Apple ID password and anywhere else you might use that same password.