TikTok Influencers Are Wrong About Hackers Stealing Credit Card Information Via AirDrop
Before I start: No, people can’t steal your credit card information using AirDrop. AirDrop doesn’t even know your credit card number.
Recently, a hoax has been spreading on TikTok (the source of the rumor is unclear), with viral videos now claiming that hackers can use the AirDrop feature on the iPhone to steal your credit card information from your Apple Wallet. This news was first reported by The Daily Dot , which, to its credit, quickly exposed this nonsense.
What the rumors say
In videos that have been spotted on the affected social media app over the past few weeks, popular users including @vanessaromito13 and @the_journey76 urge their audiences to be wary of Apple’s AirDrop feature after a “recent update”, claiming that hackers can now steal your credit card. information just by walking past you with an iPhone in your pocket. Specifically, the latter says that hackers could “go past you now and from one iPhone to another using the AirDrop setup and get all the cards in your wallet.” In your Apple Wallet.” Meanwhile, the former is trying to offer a solution by urging subscribers to disable the “search on other iPhones” setting.
Fortunately, neither one nor the other is true.
Can people steal information via AirDrop?
Whatever caused these concerns, there’s nothing in the latest iPhone update (iOS 18.2) that addresses that. Despite concerns about AirDrop, last week’s update didn’t make any changes to either AirDrop or Apple Wallet, instead focusing on Apple Intelligence .
Instead, the rumors seem to be a rehashing of earlier concerns about the iPhone’s NameDrop feature , which allows two iPhones to share contact information simply by coming into close proximity. Even law enforcement stepped in to stoke the panic, but tech experts were quick to point out that the feature requires extremely close physical proximity and consent on both sides . In fact, most have concluded that it does not pose much of a risk.
The claim that people can use AirDrop to steal your credit cards by simply walking past you with their iPhone nearby raises a similar fear, but doesn’t even mention the existing feature.
First, there is no “search on other iPhones” setting that you can turn off. To put it bluntly, the influencer might be referring to the Device Merge setting added with NameDrop, or the ability to customize AirDrop permissions to receive requests from everyone within 10 minutes.
However, none of them work in the described way. “Device merging” is a NameDrop-only feature, and accepting requests from everyone simply means that other users may offer to send you files that you’ll still have to accept before they get to your phone. In order for them to receive the files from your phone, you will need to send them yourself. And yet, your settings will revert to “Contacts Only” after 10 minutes, with no permanent option to share with everyone available.
Secondly, AirDrop cannot interact with Apple Wallet. This feature can only transfer files accessible through the iPhone’s file browser, and Apple Wallet doesn’t store information there. And even if it were, Apple Wallet doesn’t actually have your credit card information – it uses a “device account number” generated by your bank or card provider, which is encrypted along with everything else in your wallet, and that’svery difficult to do. anything, as long as you don’t have an iPhone it’s linked to. According to Apple , “your card number is never stored on your device or on Apple’s servers.”
In short, the biggest risk of someone nearby stealing your credit card number through Apple Wallet is if they see the last four digits of your card by physically looking at your screen. And even then, there is little they can do about it.
Can people steal your Apple Pay transactions using Tap-to-Pay technology?
So yes, this recent warning is a hoax. AirDrop can’t do anything with your payment information, and it would take a little more diligence for a hacker to get money from your Apple Pay than just walking past you with an iPhone in your pocket. But this does not mean that you should not be vigilant.
There are currently two known ways for people to steal money from you using Apple Pay, but neither of them will give them permanent access to your financial information.
The first is to take advantage of stressed buyers by overcharging them. As The Daily Dot also reports, if you’ve already approved a transaction by double-tapping your Apple Wallet and confirming the payment (using FaceID, TouchID, or a PIN), but haven’t yet seen the merchant’s screen, they can charge you whatever they want by simply swiping your phone to yours, without first confirming the sale. In one case, a woman was charged $975 for a $10 box of chocolates because she was already preparing to use Apple Pay before she even saw the scammer’s merchant screen and found out how much they were actually going to charge her. Always make sure you can see the payment before you activate Apple Pay, rather than relying on what the merchant says.
The second one is a little more difficult to avoid. While hackers can’t use AirDrop to steal your payment information, they can use their own software to steal transactions over the air from nearby payment terminals. This is a little harder to avoid and is typically used by particularly busy vendors, such as music festivals. In this case, you’ll only get the amount you were planning to pay the seller, but if you plan to be in a crowded area where there are a lot of sales going on at once, pay attention to other people near you while you’re using Apple Pay—they’ll have to be there to steal a transaction using NFC. However, in case they succeed, you can at least be sure that all information sent to the terminalwill be encrypted .
Again, there are legitimate threats to watch out for and caution is advised. But if you let panic-mongering social media posts drive you into a frenzy of worry, it will only make it harder to keep track of the real risks and could cause you to miss out on the real benefits that encryption-focused payment methods like Pay.