Calgary senior victim of elaborate iPhone clone scam

A Calgary senior is warning others after he was scammed out of $1,000 after buying what he thought was a new iPhone 15 Pro Max.

“I didn’t have any doubt that it was real,” Boyd told Global News.

The 80-year-old, whom Global News is not fully identifying due to safety and retribution concerns, said he bought the phone on May 1 on Facebook Marketplace. Boyd said the seller then showed up at his place with the phone in hand.

“It was all sealed,” the senior pointed out.

The seller even provided him with the “original” receipt showing the phone had been purchased down east back in October 2023. Boyd said he also checked the phone’s serial number and the International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI). All checked out fine.

Boyd said the first sign of a problem was when he tried to update the phone with his own information and it wouldn’t update. It was only after he took it to a representative at a local Apple retailer, that he realized he had been duped.

“It took him a minute or two,” he said. “Then he asked, ‘Where did you get this phone? It’s fake.’”

Boyd told Global News while the money he paid for the phone wasn’t “trivial or anything,” his biggest regret is the danger he put his family in by allowing the scammer into his home.

“It’s far beyond the thousand dollars. Far beyond that,” he said. “I brought the guy here face-to-face.”

“It’s the agony of realizing I put my wife and my family in jeopardy.”

Global News took the phone to tech expert Mike Yawney.

“At first glance, it’s a really good fake,” Yawney said.

But after he looked closer, Yawney was able to spot some telltale signs that the phone was indeed a clone.

“The fonts on some of the apps are just slightly different,” he pointed out. “Something just looks off.”

The apps also weren’t able to be edited, which Yawney said showed they were basically “screenshots” and not real apps. He also noticed a strange circle that popped up on the phone’s main screen.

And when he asked Siri a question, she did not answer. All things, he said, the average person just may not know what to look for when buying an iPhone.

“The thing is if you don’t use an iPhone and you’re picking up an iPhone for the first time — you would have no idea,” he said. “You have to look really closely to know that this iPhone isn’t legit.”

Yawney suggested checking the serial number and the IMEI numbers to be sure, but when he did that, it showed the phone was legitimate.

“They have found a legit serial number from another phone and they’ve programmed it into this phone,” he explained. “But really it’s just a clone of another phone out there.”

His suggestion: throw it out.

“I wouldn’t use it,” he said. “You don’t know the software that is on the phone. Where is your information going?”

Boyd has tried calling the seller to get his money back, but the phone is not accepting any new messages. He also contacted Calgary Police and Facebook to report the scam.

“I just want to help prevent others from getting into a circumstance where they experience the horror of being scammed,” he said.

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