Last November, Reyhan Ayas lost her iPhone while leaving a Manhattan bar when a man snatched it and ran off. But after that, she also lost access to her Apple account and $10,000 (about Rs 8 lakh).
Ayas, who's originally from Istanbul, said Apple was unhelpful when she tried to regain access to her account, Business Insider reported.
She told The Wall Street Journal how the thief locked her out of the iPhone 13 Pro Max by using her passcodes to access it before changing the device's password. in the next 24 hours, the thief then stole $10,000 from her bank accounts, Ayas said.
The 31-year-old said she borrowed another iPhone to find hers using the "Find My iPhone" function but by then she'd already been locked out of her Apple account. Because she had lost access to her Apple account, she was also unable to log on to her MacBook computer. "I didn't know what was going on," Ayas told Business Insider.
She filed a complaint with the police the next day and contacted Apple support, which advised her to get a new SIM card and a new iPhone, which she did. But while visiting an Apple Store for help, Ayas received an email showing an application for an Apple credit card and another email showed that the application had been approved, she told the publication.
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The Apple support team "was not helpful at all," Ayas said, adding that she had to approach Goldman Sachs, which issues credit cards for Apple, for help.
As per the Business Insider report, during her most recent conversation with an Apple representative, Ayas was told that there was no way to regain access to her iCloud account.
"Apple takes a lot of pride in being, like, a closed-security environment. But they rarely talk about if someone gets into that closed-security environment; it is also closed to the people who own the account," Ayas told the publication. "It can absolutely turn against you."
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